So much has been written about managing conflict at work. On training courses, when students get to the conflict management part, you can see some of them glaze over or repeat the mantra: Competing, Accommodating, Avoiding, Compromising, Collaborating: the 5 well-know styles for managing a bust up. That’s a problem. Conflict happens because we are […]
Disadvantages of Constraints
The disadvantages of constraints. If you have particular dates in mind for several activities in your schedule you may be tempted to insert constraints to fix the start or finish dates of these activities. Try to avoid this temptation, as constraints come with disadvantages. Constraints are not forbidden in most scheduling guidelines, but their broad […]
Are You Receiving Accurate Project Status Reports?
When project managers turn in their weekly or monthly status reports, the real work begins for the Project Management Office. Even if your project management software does a lot of the data crunching for you, there’s still an element of human interaction to review and check the information before consolidated dashboards or reports leave the […]
Portfolio Management in Small Companies
“Portfolio management in small companies– that’s something only big firms do, isn’t it?” Not at all! Even small businesses can benefit from taking a portfolio management approach to managing their projects. In fact, you could argue that portfolio management is even more important in smaller companies. In these businesses, taking a risk on the wrong […]
NAVFAC IPS Checklist and Longest Path Considerations
The Naval Facilities Engineering Command’s (NAVFAC) Initial Project Schedule (IPS) checklist has a number of items to consider in relation to the NAVFAC IPS longest path. Scheduling guidelines are worth studying to increase ones knowledge of scheduling principles, which results in higher quality project schedules. Several notable rules in the NAVFAC IPS checklist were explained […]
Guidelines for Insertion of Schedule Constraints
Wide usage of schedule constraints is generally discouraged. But what are specific situations when schedule constraints should be avoided and others when constraints are suitable? Schedule constraints describe important dates in the life of the project that network logic alone does not capture. But constraints both hard and soft should be limited in the schedule, […]
5 Pitfalls of Managing Large Portfolios And How To Manage Them
Managing a large portfolio of projects and programs comes with its own challenges. PMO leaders working with large corporate portfolios face a number of pitfalls. This is especially where the project management maturity has grown over time and the portfolio has evolved and scaled almost organically. There comes a tipping point where it’s important to […]
A Brief Introduction to EVM
A Brief Introduction to EVM Earned Value Management is the key to unlocking the door to a plethora of project status metrics is earned value, which is a way of placing a value on the progress of work achieved. But how is earned value specified? Much in Earned Value Management (EVM) hinges on the monetized […]
How To Secure Team Support for EVM
EVM (Earned Value Management) is a tried-and-tested way of managing project performance. But it has a reputation for being difficult to implement and hard to manage. If you’ve made the decision to implement Earned Value Management for project monitoring in your business, you’ll need to overcome a degree of healthy skepticism from your project management […]
Milestone Types
Milestones appear as little black diamonds on the Gantt chart and like diamonds, milestones are multifaceted. You can use different milestone types to mark numerous types of events. Milestones are unique activities; they have no duration or resource assignments. Like other activities, however, they do have relationship assignments. But milestones primarily are markers placed at […]