Agile project management is a well-known term associated with the management of software projects. But what about large construction projects? Is it important or possible for construction projects to be agile? Agile project management appears to overturn traditional project management, which consists of a fixed scope of work. Agile project management recognizes the changing customer […]
How Your PMO Can Add Value To Your Organization
We hear a lot of executives talk about how their PMO can add value add value but people aren’t always clear what they mean by that. And even if they do know what they are striving for, the PMO team sometimes struggle to work out what it really looks like in practice. In this article […]
Schedule Reliability and Buffers
Project schedules tend toward tardiness, but what can be done to make schedules more reliably on time? Schedule buffer similar to a cost contingency helps projects become more reliable. Project plans are generally more optimistic than reality. Reasons for this disconnect are that project plans do not consider: inefficiencies in the handover of tasks between […]
Critical Path Barriers
Critical path barriers obscure and invalidate the true critical path through the schedule. Does your schedule accurately represent the longest path or critical path through the schedule network? Critical path is an important concept in scheduling. It determines the duration of the project. It also highlights where to investigate for schedule optimization efforts; shortening the […]
The 3 Questions Every Project Health Check Should Include
The end of the year and the beginning of the year are times when Project Management Office teams often focus on project reviews and performing a project health check. Yes, a project health check should be built into the regular calendar of events, but we often see that executive teams demand a different level of […]
Ensuring Quality Schedule Updates
A quality Integrated Project Schedule (IPS) is great, but quality updates to that IPS schedule are also very important for measuring progress accurately. An IPS is like a map, and is only part of the reason for accurate progress measurement. Accurate updates are absolutely essential for properly locating where on the IPS map your project […]
What Should A PMO Meeting Cover?
What should a PMO meeting cover in your organization? Project Management Office teams can be made up of a diverse group. You may have project management experts, or the project management team leader, project co-ordinators or others in more junior positions, analysts, software experts, data experts, business leaders, trainers, strategists and more. When you get […]
Virtual Float
Sometimes the process of updating your schedule creates virtual float. What exactly is virtual float? And is it good for your schedule? Float in scheduling is good. It’s what all proficient managers strive for. But schedule delay updates on the critical path may generate float on other paths, which is not good float. This delay […]
Project Review or Lessons Learned? What’s the Difference?
You know that projects need governance, but where does the project review and lessons learned fit in? And what’s the difference between them? They both take a project and review what’s happened on it with the objective of coming up with a written report for next steps. In this article we look at the differences […]
Resilience an Important Schedule Quality Attribute
An optimized schedule is good, but a resilient schedule is better. It provides for a more reliable plan that is less susceptible to risk and more able to recover from unexpected external events. Most inexperienced sea voyagers plan the shortest route to their destination, but any sailor “worth his salt” knows better. The shortest way […]