Method123

1. Hold Everyone Accountable for Scope Management Many scope management processes work well at the project manager level, but get compromised by team members. If the project manager is diligent in enforcing the scope change rules, your customer may try to go directly to team members for changes. The bottom line is that everyone needs to be held accountable for the scope management process. Team members must understand the process and why it is important. Your customer  must also understand the process and its importance. Don't consider these procedures to be only of interest to the project manager and the sponsor. Make sure the procedures are communicated to the entire team. 2. Use a Change Control Board for Large Projects Sometimes on very large projects, the project sponsor does not feel comfortable making the scope change decisions alone. This may especially be the case if the effect of the change will impact other organizations. It may also be the case that multiple organizatio...

1. Hold Everyone Accountable for Scope Management Many scope management processes work well at the project manager level, but get compromised by team members. If the project manager is diligent in enforcing the scope change rules, your customer may try to go directly to team members for changes. The bottom line is that everyone needs to be held accountable for the scope management process. Team members must understand the process and why it is important. Your customer  must also understand the process and its importance. Don't consider these procedures to be only of interest to the project manager and the sponsor. Make sure the procedures are communicated to the entire team. 2. Use a Change Control Board for Large Projects Sometimes on very large projects, the project sponsor does not feel comfortable making the scope change decisions alone. This may especially be the case if the effect of the change will impact other organizations. It may also be the case that multiple organizatio...

Estimating is hard enough. It is even harder if you are not prepared. Estimating a 20 hour chunk of work is not so hard. Estimating for full projects or large chunks of work can be challenging. Templates can help, but consider the following steps before you begin the estimating process. Get a clear picture of the work that is being estimated Many problems with estimation come because the estimator is not really sure what the work entails. You should avoid estimating work that you do not understand. This should not imply that you can know every detail. The estimating contingency is a way to reflect some of this remaining uncertainty. Determine who should be involved in the estimating process The project manager may or may not know enough to make the estimates on his or her own. It is usually a good practice to look for estimating help from team members, clients, subject matter experts, etc. This will usually result in the estimates being far more accurate than you would get by yourself....

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...