Tag Archives: tips

Project Management and balancing your workload

Hi, Happy new year – I hope all your projects come in on time, under budget and with all the scope your sponsor wants.

I’m doing a series of blogs over at EasyProjects.Net .

Full disclosure, I’m one of their consultants, I go in and help their clients implement the methodology that surrounds the great tool. Continue reading

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Planning the Project – how to massage the timeline

You have worked with the team and the sponsor to create the project WBS and finalize the scope. You’ve turned the WBS into a schedule and you’ve validated the estimates of duration. You look at the delivery date with confidence and your jaw drops. The project is going to be ready 6 months after the date you expected it.

What do you do? Continue reading

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Planning the project – how much is enough? Part 2

So you have your WBS in place and you see it’s touching on every aspect of the project and you’ve talked it through with the stakeholders and sponsor. Great work! You may have also faced the question about how detailed it needs to be. Some people want everything on the task list and some don’t. But you need to be able to manage the project so you need to find a balance. That’s a topic for a later post. Continue reading

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Planning the project – how much is enough? Part 1

Last time I posted I gave some tips on getting the project initiated well. That leads us into some tips on planning. In my opinion, initiation isn’t complete until the plan is signed off. It seems that one of the lessons project managers take some time to learn is that phases aren’t usually cut and dried. You learn something every step along the way that opens up questions about the step before.This isn’t a failure of the methodology; it’s reality. Continue reading

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Happy Thanksgiving Canada and a few great blogs

Hi, well the turkey is eaten – or packed away for sandwiches later – in our house the vibe was great and the food was wonderful. I hope everyone had a great day.

I follow a few good PM blogs so I thought I would send out thanks to the people posting by sending their links out to you. Continue reading

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Time and Stress Management – lessons relearned

I’ve been blog absent for almost 2 weeks – just 2 hours short of two weeks. It’s been a crazy two weeks: dad passed away and I moved. Dad went quickly and in his sleep. We know he wasn’t going to make it so we were able to say goodbye and we are all very sad when we think about it. The move went well from the perspective of the moving, but the place was so dirty I couldn’t unpack. Then I went away for two days to work with a client. So it’s been more than a week, and I just unpacked the last box today. Continue reading

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Prioritization and emergencies

So, what happens to a schedule when emergencies happen?
At one time or another the team will have emergencies that take them away from the critical work. In most projects, there will be changes to the market that cause emergency changes to scope, timelines or budget. And, often the PM is the one to direct and support the team through the emergencies. Continue reading

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Keeping balance in your life

I think the topic is applicable to everyone who works. Whether you work for someone or for yourself. You do your best work when you are energized and excited. You can only be energized and excited if you have balance in your life – as a colleague of mine says, you need to fill your buckets before you can do a great job. Continue reading

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Using your lessons learned. How to make the next project easier

We all know the value of using lessons learned from other projects,but how often do we get to use them?

What gets in the way?

I know it’s often difficult to find the lessons learned on any project, let alone a project that is comparable to the one you are about to start.Time,or lack of it, often gets in the way of thinking about any lessons you might want to implement in your new projects. And, organizational assumptions can seem like a barrier to making changes: “we’ve always done it this way and there’s really no way to make it better in this company”. Continue reading

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Status reports – useful or not?

I’ve been reading a number of posts on LinkedIn and other blogs about status reports and why they don’t work. Most of theses are promoting a different model for status reporting. The problem is not with a format of reporting, but with the process of reporting. Continue reading

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