What is the key for successful project management? Do you follow a certain methodology? Do you use a certain software tools like MS Project for Gantt charts? Continued…

Recently on one of my LinkedIn groups for project managers, there was a discussion on favorite project management books.  There were lot of good recommendations by the group members and I am providing the final list below based on ranking – Continued…

Agile processes are now accepted as valid alternatives to traditional software development processes. Most people who adopt agile do so to realize the benefits of faster delivery, higher quality, products that more closely match user needs, and so on. Not everyone is so enamored ofagile. Some teams and individuals balk when a mandate to “become agile” is passed down from some “higher-up” in the organization or when some young go-getter decides to start an idealistic grassroots movement to effect change. Continued…

Creating Project Dashboards to Display Project Progress

When it comes to projects, there are as many questions to answer as there are project teams, but “Where are we?” is by far the most popular. The key to understanding a project is to make regular measurements—both quantitative and qualitative—and display the measurements publicly. When project managers display these measurements as part of the project status, teams are able to adjust their work and proceed more successfully.

I like to call these measurements a “project dashboard.” You may not be able to show all the project measurements in one small area, such as one piece of paper, but taken together, the project measurements display your velocity, distance, consumption, and location—much as a car dashboard does. Continued…

   

Since the publication of Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained,1 agile processes have grown increasingly popular. Agile processes  allow  for  changing  require- ments throughout the development cycle and stress collaboration between software devel- opers and customers and early product delivery. Continued…

Project management can be described as the activity of bringing all participants from within a department to successfully complete a product deliverable. Iterative planning and tracking are techniques used by some project managers to avoid having to choose between reducing the number of features or extending the schedule.

Abstract

Project management can be described as the activity of bringing all participants from within a department to successfully complete a product deliverable. Iterative planning and tracking are techniques used by some project managers to avoid having to choose between reducing the number of features or extending the schedule. Continued…

Communication is vital in project management. There are several groups of people with which the project manager needs to ensure clear and effective communication, the stakeholders, vendors and the project team. This can be pictured as being linked by a web, with the Project Manager at the center. Information flows through and around the web, enabling each participant to fulfill his or her role.

Time and time again in post-project lesson learned assessments, project teams list communication as one of the most needed areas for improvement. Many times on troubled projects, project team members feel that if the communication had been better, the project would have had a better outcome.

As a project manager, questions we should ask our self –
• Am I sending messages out clearly and concisely?
• Do the receivers of my message take the time to understand the message being sent and then take the time to repeat back to the sender their understanding?

I found the following video on YouTube that illustrates how the deliverables can be wrong due to lack of proper communication -

With my current role of managing global virtual project teams, I have been asked repeatedly by my peers on what are the key success factors of implementing SAP for plant start-up in Asia, especially since the users have no previous SAP experience and business process knowledge ,and English is not their first language.

As you can see, global project teams have several unique characters and challenges, such as multi-functional, constantly evolving to meet business and resource constraints, matrix structured, culturally diverse and geographically distributed. Continued…