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Effective project budget tracking is essential to ensure that project costs do not spiral out of control — and potentially threaten project success. This informative and easy-to-read article explores the basics of project budget tracking, including best practices and a 7-phase methodology. One of the most difficult tasks in project management is cost tracking and...
Have you ever heard a project manager refer to “formal” project management and wondered what exactly makes it formal? While different organizations might have their own definition of the term, formal project management is the area of interest to professional project managers, and is the preferred style of management for most enterprise projects. Here’s a...
Of all the things a project manager needs to manage—timelines, budgets, change orders and so on—the most important of all may be stakeholders’ expectations. After all, completion of any project depends on stakeholders doing what they’re expected to do, and the final determination of whether a project is a success or failure is made by...
Of all the documents that get created, reviewed and shared over the life of a project—project plans, timelines, budgets, status reports and issue logs, just to name a few—the project scope statement may be the one that has the greatest influence over the project as a whole. The scope statement describes the goals, deadlines and...
Risk management is one of the core project knowledge areas, an essential and ongoing process which can be described as the methodical process of identification, analysis and response to project risks involving several major phases which are similar to all projects. Regardless of the methodology or approach, risk management processes generally include risk identification, analysis,...
As a means of judging a project’s progress and how well the initial project plan is being adhered to, Schedule Variance is one of the most useful and common metrics used. It can give quick insight into how well the project has performed so far and whether it is ahead of schedule or behind it....
An end of project report is used by project managers and their team at the end of a project to determine how the project performed. Whether your end of project report is as short as a single page or long enough to fill a three-ring binder, the purpose of the report is the same: Document...
Everyone knows, in theory at least, that effective project communication is essential. Almost any project manager, if asked to list the factors which are important for project success, would put communication near the top of the list. Unfortunately, communication is often taken for granted. Even when project managers put an early emphasis on communication, it...
Every project team takes on at least a little bit of its project manager’s personality. If the PM is disorganized and careless, the team will almost certainly miss deadlines and produce substandard deliverables, even if the same team members have performed well on other projects. In the same way, teams working under a harsh, unfriendly...
What separates elite, high-performance agile IT teams in some enterprises, from their hard-working — and in some cases even harder working — yet less successful counterparts in other enterprises? It is not that they borrow a page from the Folger’s Crystals playbook and secretly replace all team members with accomplished Scrum masters. Rather, it is...
