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This provides program and project managers with a primer on business strategy – its purposes, components, and high-level tools and techniques. For those of you currently operating at the pair-of-hands level, this article is a wake-up call. For those of you who currently operate at the partner level, this article is a refresher or quick self-knowledge check. In either case, a basic knowledge of strategic planning is the place to start.
–> Goal Setting: The First Step
–> Strategy Development Process – The Road Map
–> Customer Analysis – Getting the Truth
–> Internal Business Analysis – Health Check
–> Strategic Choices
–> Strategic Thinking – Optimizing Assets
–> Implementing Strategic Decisions – Execution Matters
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Have you ever been in a project that had time and cost constraints that were never going to be met? If you have, you know the pain that everyone suffers when they try to do the impossible.
Effective project managers cultivate the courage and competency to push back against arbitrary budgets and deadlines to negotiate realistic win-win cost and schedule estimates for their projects. This article explores how to negotiate realistic estimates to set realistic expectations.
Check here for more info online project management software here …
Perhaps the most arduous task that afflicts project managers involves keeping today’s aggressive project schedules on track. Because resources are continually restricted more and more and the highly skilled, high-priced resources are often required for multiple projects, resource constraints become one of the highest risks to the project schedule. To help ensure that project schedules are met, project managers have learned to concentrate on a project’s critical path. They have also learned that the resources used along the critical path—the critical chain of resources—especially those resources shared among projects, must be proactively managed.
This is where Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) can aid the project manager—by planning and managing a project’s schedule through a unique optimization process that joins the task-dependent critical path with the critical chain—the resource-dependent tasks that impact the project completion date. The critical chain explicitly defines a resource-leveled set of tasks. If the quantity of resources is unlimited, the critical path and the critical chain are identical.
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Project risks are a fact of life that every project manager must deal with. “Project risk is an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on at least one project objective, such as time, cost, scope or quality,” as defined by the Project Management Institute’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge – Third Edition. Managing project risk involves analyzing and prioritizing risks so that the project manager and the team can focus their mitigation effort on the top risks.
Many project managers are familiar with analyzing risks on a project level. This works well for scope and quality risks; however, it is the task-related risks that can negatively affect the accuracy of the schedule and cost estimates and thus negatively affect the delivery of the tasks – and, ultimately, the success of the project.
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Blog 8
Accommodating change in the software development process is the nemesis of all development projects. The generally accepted practice in linear methodologies to accommodate change is to freeze the accumulated requirements at a specific point in time. Change is not prevented nor are new requirements prohibited. The freeze simply slows down the change process because all changes have to be justified to management before acceptance.
The good thing about a linear method is that necessary and appropriate changes get made with oversight and are documented in regulated environments. The bad thing is that it takes time. Both the customer and the development team often view the process as bureaucratic, time-consuming, additional overhead, and simply unnecessary.
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The enterprise project management business process encompasses project, program, and portfolio management. Program and project managers concentrate on doing the work correctly, while portfolio managers concentrate on doing the correct work. Project and program managers get the work accomplished on time and within budget to the satisfaction of their stakeholders. Portfolio managers help organizational decision makers select, categorize, prioritize, and control all work across the enterprise. They work to enhance strategic decision making, align projects and programs with the organization’s business strategy, maximize enterprise resource utilization and capacity, and monitor the organization’s operational efficiency.
Check here for more info Microsoft Project Planner here..
The similarities between project management and Six Sigma include:
* Use of projects as the avenue for improvement.
* Utilization of established project management techniques to effectively manage a project and project teams.
* Necessity of actively involved and proactive project sponsors or champions to help ensure project success.
* Life cycle and phases.
* Need for a well-trained project facilitator to lead the effort.
More on Microsoft Project Certification here …
Upgrade to Office Project Standard 2007 so you can plan, manage, and communicate project information quickly and more effectively. The tables below introduce you to the new features of Office Project Standard 2007. They also show you features, initially included in previous Project Standard versions, which have been improved to help you.
Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 includes all the capabilities in Office Project Standard 2007. In addition, Office Project Professional 2007 provides collaborative enterprise project management capabilities when used with Microsoft Office Project Server 2007.
Visit site: Microsoft Project 2007 Templates
* Effectively manage and understand project schedules
* Get productive quickly
* Leverage existing data
* Build professional charts and diagrams
* Effectively communicate information
* Gain greater control of resources and finances
* Quickly access the information you need
* Track projects according to your needs
* Customize Office Project 2007 to your needs
* Get Office Project 2007 assistance when you need it
Click here to know more on Microsoft Office Project 2007 and also the Gantt Diagram here
This whitepaper highlights the key new features in Microsoft Office Project 2007 and describes how it is more powerful and easier to use as a project management tool. This document is divided into three sections: Planning, Communicating, and Tracking & Analyzing. Learn about new tools such as ‘multi-level undo’ or ‘show change highlighting’ or ‘task drivers’ and understand how these and other tools will increase your effectiveness as a project manager.
–> Planning
–> Enhanced Project Guide
–> Enhanced Help
–> Enhanced Templates
–> New Task Drivers
–> Multiple Level Undo’s
–> Communicating
–> Enhanced Views
–> Visual Highlight
–> Visual Reports
–> Enhanced Flexible Project Tracking and Analysis
More on MS Project Software here …..
