Five Tactics to Prioritize What’s Important

Prioritizing involves two steps: identifying the most important work to be done and making the time to do it. Organizations that fail to empower individuals to set priorities and act on them risk squandering their teams’ creative potential. Take these steps to ensure your people can get their most meaningful work done. 1. Eliminate interruptions...

Four ways to gracefully kill a project

Not every project makes its way to the finish line, and not every project should. As a project manager, you’re almost certain to find yourself, at some point in your career, running a project that has no chance of success, or that should never have been initiated in the first place. Sometimes the fault lies...

Dealing with Change Requests and Issue Management

Ask any project manager and they will probably tell you they aren’t a huge fan of change. Change to a project means the potential for resource relocation, budget mishaps and delayed deliverables. Project managers spend a lot of time allocating these pieces of a project and having to rework the plan can be messy and...

The Enterprise Project Life Cycle: From Initiation to Closing

If you want to learn more about enterprise project management—either because you’re beginning to work on enterprise projects, or because you hope to become a project manager later in your career—the project management life cycle is one of the first concepts you should become acquainted with. The enterprise project life cycle describes the phases of...

Derailed projects: What causes them & how to avoid it

No one ever expects a project to go perfectly. Even the most expertly-managed project is certain to encounter at least a bit of difficulty along the way, whether it comes in the form of an unanticipated change in requirements, the departure of an important team member or any of a dozen other potential issues. Depending...

The Seven Most In-Demand Project Management Skills

Project management is an increasingly growing field in today’s market. With so many companies evolving at a pace that’s faster than ever before in terms of technology and customer needs, a good project manager is absolutely essential in terms of keeping up. Here are seven project management skills in high demand: Strong Leadership According to...

Expectation management: The one goal that rules them all

Sometime between the First Age of Middle Earth and 2001, a Hobbit named Frodo, a wizard named Gandalf, and a bunch of other characters headed off on a quest to find the “One Ring that Ruled them All.” Thankfully, project management isn’t quite as daunting as Lord of the Rings. For example, there are no...

Team building tips: 5 symptoms of low-performance teams

With apologies to the glass-half-full optimists among us, the fact is that many workplaces today are marked – or at times, marred – by what can be called low-performance teams. Unlike their high-performance counterparts, members of low-performance teams are not necessarily comprised of toxic troublemakers; who, if not always easy to remove, are certainly easy...

Best Practices for Prioritizing Project Work for Your Team

Prioritizing project work is a challenge experienced by virtually every project manager, in every industry. In enterprise organizations, the difficulties can be especially daunting, given that the project manager may be dealing with hundreds of tasks and sub-tasks, and coordinating the efforts of dozens of internal and external stakeholders. Despite the challenges, project prioritization must...

Business Case Risk Assessment: How to Write a Risk Log

When a problem or opportunity is identified, a business case is created which lays out how it can be solved or exploited, how much it will cost, how it will be done and what the likely outcomes of it will be. One piece of information which is often relegated to the back of everyone’s collective...