Five Best Practices for Project Baselining

Project baselining is a set of stored values — such as estimated budget, planned schedule and anticipated effort — that serve as a reference to help determine whether a project is on or off track. Here are four vital best practices to ensure that project baselining is an asset vs. a liability: Don’t wait until...

How to Identify and Change Priorities at Work

Knowing how to identify priorities at work and being able to pivot project resources to make sure they are addressed is a vitally important skill for any project manager. This workload prioritization can spell the difference between project success and failure, with the speed at which information is fed into the decision-making process and those...

Best practices for stakeholder engagement on an enterprise level

One of the most common challenges that an enterprise project manager can expect to face is a lack of stakeholder engagement. Sooner or later, every project manager faces situations in which customers, executive sponsors, team members or other stakeholders seem to drift away from a project. Sometimes the problem is that other projects are pulling...

The Challenges of Cross Collaboration & How to Solve Them

Projects using cross collaboration teams are fraught with peril. Research for the Harvard Business Review has found that 75% of cross-functional teams aren’t successful. Thus, it requires a skilled PM to be able to navigate the various risks associated with combining a multi-disciplinary team and achieve success for the project. We’ve taken a look at...

3 Critical Mistakes About Critical Path Method — and How to Avoid Them

The critical path is the longest sequence of dependent tasks on a project that must be completed on time, in order for that project to meet its deadline. Or to look at things from a different angle, the duration of all tasks on the critical path determine the overall duration of a project. For example,...

Six Strategies for Dealing with Difficult Vendors

Vendor relationships have a mutual correlation to your organization’s success. If you do well, they do well and if they don’t perform as you need them to, then it will cause you major headaches. Just because you’re doing business with a vendor, doesn’t mean you’re necessarily getting the most out of the relationship. Minor delays...

How to Create a Progression Plan for Your Team Members

With 87% of Millennials stating in Gallup research that personal development opportunities are a key factor in their professional satisfaction it is clear that a dedicated project manager should be focusing on providing those for his workforce. While previously, sending employees away on a vaguely work-related seminar once every two years might have passed for...

Five Tips for Managing Vendor Relationships

Having strong vendor relationships goes a long way to achieving success. Good vendor management is all about ensuring communication and supply lines are clear and maintained, so that your vendors are happy and you get the goods and services you need, when you need them. Keeping relationships healthy benefits both parties and means that you...

Four Scenarios Where You Should Escalate an Issue

There are often times when escalation of an issue to a higher-up stakeholder is the right call, but project managers are often reticent to do so, for fear it might reflect badly on their ability to handle situations. This is an unhelpful attitude, both for the project manager and the project as recognizing when something...

Four Best Practices for Issue Management

With the broad lexicon of management speak, speakers, even those who consider themselves completely fluent, can often get terms mixed up. Most commonly this is when two terms that are often used in the same context are used interchangeably and are presumed to mean approximately the same thing. This is the case with risk management...