Method123

All projects have risks and all risks have the potential for negatively impacting the project. You use risk management to determine the risks that are important enough to manage. During the risk identification process, you may encounter many risks that have some likelihood to occur and have a marginal impact to the project. The question to ask is whether the risk has enough impact on the project to worry about (this same question occurs for both qualitative and quantitative approaches). The answer says something about your risk tolerance. For example, let’s say you identify a risk that is very likely to occur, but has an impact of $100 and one-half day duration. You may choose not to manage it. You cannot list this as an assumption since there is a good chance the risk will occur. However, the impact is small enough that you are willing to absorb the cost if it occurs, rather than deal with managing the risk (which would probably be more costly). Therefore you would choose a risk manag...

When was the last time you rode in a car with wheels that were not properly aligned? Chances are it was a pretty rough ride. The car either pulled in one direction, making it hard work to keep it in your lane, or, it worked against itself as one tire pointed one way and another tire another way. The same thing can happen in our companies. The ride can be pretty bumpy, not to mention noisy, unless everyone is pointed in the same direction. That’s why it’s important to understand the five benefits of an aligned organization Benefit #1 – Ensures Everyone Works on the Right Things The first benefit of an aligned organization is that with a common goal for everyone to strive towards, the right things are worked on. Here’s the trick - you need make sure that everyone clearly understands the goal and the end game. The best way to accomplish this is to clearly communicate the strategy of the company. What are the three to five most important things your company is working on? Once those are ...

Sometimes the project manager places too high an expectation on the amount of foresight and vision that customers and sponsors have. In many cases, the project manager will go to the customer looking for answers to help define the project and the customer will not have all of the information needed. This happens all the time and it does not mean that the customer does not know what they are doing. In many cases, especially for large projects, the customer has a vision of what the end results will be, but cannot yet articulate this vision into concrete objectives, deliverables and scope.  There are three approaches for when you don't know very much information on the nature of the project. Increase Estimating Range Based on Uncertainty Based on having less than complete information, the  project manager may feel the need to guess on the details. This is not a good solution. It is better to state up-front everything that you know, as well as everything that you do not know. If you a...

A Primer on Processes and Templates Recipes for cooking are a beautiful thing. A recipe tells you the ingredients and how much of each you should include in whatever you are making. It then describes what you need to do to these ingredients in order to make a dish that is not only edible, but tasty as well. It’s great that someone else has already spent the time in putting together a recipe to follow that nearly guarantees success each time. To a certain extent we use recipes in our profession as project managers. The recipes we follow are the processes and templates that guide our projects to success each time. How can you put a process together and make the most of templates? Consider the following: A Primer on Processes and Templates Start with Phases To put a process together, a good starting place is defining the major phases in which a project must go through. Think about how a project moves through your organization, and document those major steps. For example, a simplified soft...

The larger your project gets, the more you will find that the issues you encounter are political in nature. "Politics" is all about interacting with people and influencing them to get things done. This can be a good thing, a bad thing, or a neutral thing, depending on the tactics people use. Let’s consider some examples of how utilizing political skills might be good, but can also be bad. You are able to move your ideas forward in the organization and get people to act on them (good), by currying favor, suppressing other opposing ideas and taking credit for the ideas of your staff (bad) . You have an ability to reach consensus on complex matters with a number of different stakeholders (good), by working behind the scenes with people in power, making deals and destroying people who don’t get on board (bad) . You receive funding for projects that are important to you and to your organization (good), by misrepresenting the costs and benefits, and by going around the existi...

An executive has administrative or supervisory authority in an organization. That authority is used in a number of ways on projects. An executive is typically responsible for the Business Case of a project, which is used to determine whether the project should even be started. Once the project is approved they can impact the success of your project in four key areas. 1. Sponsorship and Funding Every project within a company starts with an idea. It’s hard for that idea to go much further without backing from the right person and some money to make it happen. An executive can provide the sponsorship and funding your project needs to get off the ground. They are responsible for signing off on the project charter, which describes the project, gives you the authority to manage and, most importantly, allocates the necessary funds to keep it alive. 2. Escalations and Resolution The second role an executive plays in your projects is to be the go-to person when unresolved problems surface. An e...

The Schedule Management Plan describes the process used to develop and manage the project schedule. Not all projects need a Schedule Management Plan, but if your project has a complex schedule that requires special handling, you may find this plan helpful. The components of the Schedule Management Plan can include: Roles and responsibilities. You can describe different roles and their ability to access the project schedule. Schedule owner. This is probably the project manager. Who can update? Normally the project manager, but on larger projects it could be more complex. For instance, a Project Administrator might make the initial schedule updates based on the project status reports and then provide this draft to the project manager for final updates. It is also possible that team members will update the status of their assigned activities and the project manager will perform final analysis after those updates. Who can read? Usually the schedule is not considered confidentia...