Your path to business agility
The PMO is under constant pressure. From maintaining standards for project management practices to planning and delivering projects – the PMO needs to be in constant sync with strategy and business outcomes. This PMO blog category provides numerous recommendations from experts to encourage top down and bottom up planning, improve processes, promote stakeholder satisfaction, and ultimately eliminate silos to advance the PMO function. Get expert advice on the pros and cons of adopting a continuous planning model. Experts will also share real-world advice on choosing your next Project Portfolio Management tool and how to #BeThatPMO your business needs.
Project resources are anything that is necessary for the project to be completed. Without them, it’s impossible for a project to be completed successfully. A key element of a project’s planning phase is centered on the identification of resource requirements and how they will be allocated. The Types of Resources in Projects Human: These human...
Resource management is among the most critical – but also the most challenging – aspects of project and program management. Failing to allocate the right resources, to the right tasks, at the right time, and at the right cost invariably leads to budget and schedule overruns. It also creates frustrated team members, stakeholders and customers....
Project maintenance—the process of tracking and enabling project activities in accordance with the project plan—is an essential, but often overlooked, factor in overall project success. After spending so much time in the planning phase, many project managers have a tendency to take a step back once the other members of the project team start their...
Software projects, while not inherently unknowable, are notoriously difficult to estimate. In fact, a study by PWC found that the largest contributor to IT project failures, at 32%, was poor estimation at the project planning phase. But why do software projects take so long (i.e. longer than you think)? Well, there are a number of...
Chances are your organization is on the path to becoming more agile, and you know there’s no such thing as flipping a switch from “Not Agile” to “Agile”. It’s a step-by-step process, which is why many companies operate in a hybrid state with some teams, processes or projects becoming agile, while others are waterfall. We...
One of the most basic competencies a project manager needs to know is what are the five stages of project management. These are the project management stages that any PM can use as a basic guide to understand how a project is progressing. In brief, the five stages of project management are: Project Initiation Project...
Pioneering quality control guru W. Edwards Deming once wrote that “if you cannot describe what you are doing as a process, you do not know what you are doing.” While it is a safe bet that Mr. Deming was not specifically or exclusively referring to the overall project management process, his wise advice – or...
During the project planning phase, when drawing up a project’s timeline and setting out key moments along the project’s path, two seemingly interchangeable terms continuously crop up: “milestone” and “deliverable.” Both set out waypoints that allow a project’s progress to be judged and provide a focus for a team to work towards, but are they...
Capabilities-based planning originated in the fields of defense and military planning, and it’s understandable why. In this area, operators will never have full information about what threats or risks they face, so capabilities-based planning focuses on ensuring they have the ability to adapt and succeed in the face of change and meet whatever challenges may...
When it comes to long term project planning and management, several challenges and difficulties can arise which require a total rethink of the project’s future or scope, all the way up to having to abandon it or adopt a whole new working approach. Loss of focus, the slowing of progress, a lack of immediate results,...
