Leading the conversation on digital connected work
Project status reports are the main medium of communication between your project and its various stakeholders. The regularity of the reporting can vary between weekly, biweekly, monthly or at set milestones in the project’s path. Whenever it is prepared and shared, the most important thing is that you, as project manager, are making use of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
