Ask a project manager what the most essential and important aspects of managing are, and somewhere in the list—along with risk management, managing stakeholder expectations and effective planning—will appear “project learning reviews”. Unfortunately, they don’t occur as often as they should. This article explores why.
Negotiating The Numbers You Need
There is nothing quite so political as the negotiation and communication of a project estimate. But how do we know the estimate is ‘right’? In actual fact, estimation is not just about coming up with a number — it is about convincing someone to actually accept it.
The Challenge of Project Learning: Are We Doomed to a Life of Insanity?
A common definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, each time hoping for a different outcome. And yet, with project learning, this is often what we do, sometimes unwittingly. This article explores a way to break the cycle of madness.
Managing Resource Capacity: How Do We Know We Are Full?
How do we choose resources for projects? Is it a case of ‘lining up the usual suspects’, or are other processes at work? One of the greatest challenges for any organization is maintaining sufficient understanding of resource workload and when limits are being reached.
Managing For Quality: It’s Not As Hard As Everyone Makes Out
Quality is one of those challenging subjects in project management that people seek to innately avoid. And yet the idea of managing quality can be simple, accessible and readily easy to apply.
The Metric Colours
We live in a world obsessed by metrics. While the desire to measure the delivery of our projects has increased, the ability to do so has not actually kept pace. Nowhere is this more true than in how we report project status.