Project Management Articles & Videos

There is a better way of designing your work breakdown structure so it supports crystal clear accountability and a management style that lets the PM hold people accountable for end results, not frenzied activity. Read the article and then add your comments, pro or con, in our Project Management Blog.

Badly handled change orders cause not only overruns on budget and duration but also undermine customer/user satisfaction. The article details the mistakes project managers make on change orders and describes a methodology for doing it the right way.

Too many IT projects & departments slide into a death spiral by playing it safe and just delivering software from their projects rather than producing business value and operational improvements. Here is the way out.

We look at three types of project management office(PMO) and offer ideas on which is right for your organization and which types are a disaster.

We've identified the dumbest things that a PM can say to a sponsor or team member. There are lots to choose from and we take you through the lifecycle with examples.

Consistently successful projects are built on project team members who know what is expected of them before they start work. But the majority of team members don’t know so they waste time guessing and worrying about doing the wrong thing. There is a better way read the whole article.

Estimating project duration and costs is tough for even the most skilled PMs and it taxes executives too. See some of the estimating fantasies and some ideas that will help. Read the article and then comment in the blog

If your projects are like a circus where you march behind the elephant with a big shovel, consider how you are handling the three moments of truth that largely determine how sponsors, stakeholders and your team will interact with you.

Instead, frame your project within measured business achievements and give everyone crystal-clear and unambiguous checkpoints to monitor.

Try to borrow a team member or two from another department and suddenly it's the middle ages with feudal department managers fighting to the death to avoid sharing a resource. Sure they promised their "full support"; during initiation but now you have to battle for each of your resources..

Too many project offices (PMO) are known for paper-shuffling, pointless meetings, bureaucracy and little else. There are alternatives designs that may fit your organization and produce business value, not just paper

Sponsors and project managers doom their projects to failure when they manage only the due date rather than all four corners of a project: business value, budget, risk and due date. When we focus only on dates, people may lower the business value, increase the risk, and increase the cost of hitting that day without giving decision-makers the opportunity to decide which trade-offs they want. In this issue we lay out how to manage the trade-offs between these four corners to improve project success rates. Read the article

Too often project managers deliver progress reports that stupefy executives and tell them nothing about what's going on. This undermines the PM's credibility. These mind-numbing techniques range from "techno -babble" to the "Girl Scout cookie approach."

As organizations evolve though stages in their project management processes, knowing where your company is can help you survive and do better on your projects.

Many organizations suffer 50% or higher project failure rates. We look at the reasons and what's required of PMs, sponsors, portfolio managers and team members to improve success rates.

A good project charter throws gasoline on smoldering embers. We want all the potential problems to flare up before we start work on the project so we can resolve then early.

Are users and clients pulling up to your project drive-in window and just shouting their requirements? All project drive-ins are unhappy places that get lots of complaints because 80% of the projects leave their users with indigestion. See how to do initiation the right way.

Making Good Team Assignments

Gaining control of an organization's portfolio of projects is no easy matter. Each segment of the portfolio presents its own challenges. But, no segment is tougher to control than the segment we call puppy projects. Organizations give birth to litters of these little projects every year and they usually run uncontrolled, making a mess everywhere. Executives often kid themselves, thinking that they can focus on only the large strategic projects and somehow ram those through. However, that never works because there are too many puppies underfoot, and the mess they make is down low in the organization.

Organizations pass through stages of development as their PM processes evolve. Read what happens at each stage and how to cope. Read the article

In the PM's lounge here at 4PM.com, we hear tales of old-timers or academics who tell newer project managers never to use resource leveling. For those who don’t know the term, or how it’s applied in modern project management software, resource leveling is a process where the software ensures that no resources are assigned more work than their maximum availability on the project. The software delays tasks to achieve this. The old timers say resource leveling increases the duration, and sometimes it does. But not leveling a schedule is just a form of kidding ourselves about the project's completion date. Why turn out a schedule that shows us finishing on June 30th, but hidden in the details are work schedules that are based on some people working 80 hours a week for months? In certain environments you can make a phone call and get 15 new resources who will start work on your project Monday morning. Only then can you skip resource leveling, but in today’s resource constrained organizations, we have to use resource leveling to ensure the schedules we're creating are based on people’s actual availability, not on some fictional utilization.