Project Management Essentials

JANUARY 5, 2024

Time is our only finite resource. We cannot buy it or create it. Therefore, we must spend it wisely. Effective time management is a critical project management competency. Regrettably, many teams lack these skills or discipline and consequently fritter away their time. There is not a silver bullet to managing time more effectively.

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Project Management Essentials

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Words matter. Even in project management. Words can carry meaning far beyond their formal definitions. Connotation and perception can have unintended consequences. Even basic project management terms can create misunderstandings that can disrupt or derail a project. In this article, I expose some linguistic pitfalls impacting the profession.

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Project Management Essentials

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

An agile backlash is underway. Some organizations have declared victory, fired their agile staff, and moved on. Others are agile in name only or are “doing” agile but have not fundamentally changed the way they work. We should not blame Agile for bad Agile. The problem is not with the values, principles, and practices. Instead, it is with organizations and their approach to agility.

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Project Management Essentials

OCTOBER 1, 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will transform project management. Gartner estimated that AI may replace 80% of project management activities by 2030. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review described “How AI Will Transform Project Management.” I say, “Bring it on!” I look forward to the opportunity. AI is powerful, potentially disruptive, and will change what project managers do and how they.

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Project Management Essentials

SEPTEMBER 30, 2023

ChatGPT generated this article to demonstrate the difference between human and AI-generated content. The prompt was: “As a project manager, I want a 500-word description of how AI and machine learning will impact project management.” Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are revolutionizing industries across the board, and project management is no exception.

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Project Management Essentials

SEPTEMBER 4, 2023

We make hundreds of assumptions and take small risks daily. Without them, we would spend innumerable hours worrying about everything. We assume our car will start. Our air conditioner will work. The weather forecast is accurate. These daily assumptions are banal. Recovering from these risks may be inconvenient but not horribly impactful. Project assumptions and risks are not as casual.

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Project Management Essentials

AUGUST 1, 2023

Software projects have two measures of success. First, building and implementing working software. Second, having people use and adopt it. Project managers tend to focus their attention on delivering the application. But the project’s real success rests on user adoption. Once, I led a large project. The application was delivered on-time, on-budget, and with the documented scope.

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Project Management Essentials

JUNE 30, 2023

Large enterprises and government agencies increasingly turn to Agile for their software projects. This is a difficult shift, with many struggling to fit their new round agile pegs into their existing square waterfall holes. Cultural, structural, and procedural impediments make “being agile” a challenge. Agilists may be critical and call this “fragile-agile” or “agile-fall.” We should commend these.

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Project Management Essentials

JUNE 1, 2023

Agile seems like a mystery to many. It has an unfamiliar vocabulary and practices. To outsiders, it feels like an exclusive club. However, when we step back and inspect agile, we see that it follows common, recognizable patterns from our daily lives. Imagine it is Thursday evening. Your family is planning the upcoming weekend. There is a fixed amount of time and many things to do.

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Project Management Essentials

MAY 1, 2023

Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life searching in vain for a unifying theory of physics. The project management profession has had a similar quest—defining a methodology, set of practices, or principles that could successfully guide any project. Like physics and nature, project management is ubiquitous. Projects address simple, complicated, and complex problems.

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Project Management Essentials

APRIL 21, 2023

An Agile workflow is a timeline of steps you need to start, work, and finish an Agile project. Agile workflows break projects into short, repeated phases. Teams use these cycles to seek customer feedback and add updates to the deliverable. Workflow phases or sprints last from one week to three months, during which time teams commit to finishing a limited set of tasks.

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Project Management Essentials

APRIL 5, 2023

The project charter is a foundational deliverable created during the project’s initiation phase. The charter documents the project’s purpose, planned direction, and what is initially known. It may be called a charter, proposal, grant, or request. It may be a formal contract or a less formal document. Regardless of the format, articulating the project’s intent is invaluable and harder than expected.

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Project Management Essentials

MARCH 2, 2023

The Milestone-Kanban Schedule (MKS) is a hybrid project scheduling and management technique that combines traditional and agile best practices. The technique is well-suited for simple and complicated projects where the required deliverables are clear, but the time and effort needed to create them are not. It embraces iterative planning, uses milestones to establish a project roadmap.

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Project Management Essentials

FEBRUARY 1, 2023

The project management plan (Plan) is a powerful tool. It describes how the project will be executed. It should be tailored based on the project’s context and needs. A good Plan reduces the likelihood of misunderstanding, conflict, and disappointment. Unfortunately, in the rush to start a project, insufficient time is often devoted to creating the Plan.

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Project Management Essentials

JANUARY 3, 2023

Frederick Winslow Taylor shaped the field of management science. He believed systematic and scientific methods could be applied to managing operations and production. His work inspired the formation of the Harvard Business School and the modern assembly line. The Academy of Management named his Principles of Scientific Management as one of the 20th century’s most influential books.

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Project Management Essentials

DECEMBER 1, 2022

Disciplined Agile® (DA) and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) are two popular, second-generation agile methodologies. They build on lean-agile thinking; and standard Scrum, Kanban, and DevOps practices. They offer practitioners tools to extend and mature their agility beyond the team to programs and the broader enterprise. They emerged about a decade after the Agile Manifesto.

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Project Management Essentials

OCTOBER 31, 2022

Servant leadership and self-organizing teams are foundational Agile characteristics. However, defining these principles is like explaining gravity to a child—clear, tangible descriptions are elusive. The image of an English butler still comes to mind when I hear “servant leader.” We can use simple rules to deconstruct, visualize, and describe these abstract concepts.

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Project Management Essentials

OCTOBER 3, 2022

To successfully transform our organizations and adopt new ways of working, we need to understand how we got here. The study of management is a social science. It influences our thoughts, management practices, and organizational behaviors. Social sciences provide valuable insights. But they are not always testable, timeless, or universally applicable.

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Project Management Essentials

AUGUST 31, 2022

Agile was initially conceived to deliver software projects more quickly. We have now learned to apply these principles and practices well beyond technology. Leading enterprises are now focusing on business agility—building the organizational capability to respond more quickly to the ever-changing competitive landscape. Seventeen technology thought-leaders from around the world gathered at the.

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Project Management Essentials

AUGUST 6, 2022

Agile is a mindset described by a set of values and principles. It traces its roots to Lean, which is also foundational to other modern management theories. Lean’s primary focus is delivering value quickly and eliminating waste. Toyota was a Lean pioneer. Out of necessity, it needed to be very efficient to compete. It dramatically decreased the cost of rework by building quality into every process.

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Project Management Essentials

JULY 3, 2022

Conflict exists. It is a natural part of being human. It occurs at home and at work. We disagree. We have different perspectives and opinions. We get upset by things that were said, or not said. These events arouse our emotions. We become angry or afraid. When there is conflict, we cannot control the other person’s behaviors. However, we own our response.

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Project Management Essentials

JUNE 4, 2022

The Gantt Chart is the most widely used project scheduling tool. It visually depicts the project’s activities, when they will occur, and their interdependencies. When used correctly, it is powerful. Unfortunately, most Gantts are poorly constructed, stripping them of their value. Henry Gantt developed the tool a century ago. The original Chart was simply a horizontal bar chart showing the timing.

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Project Management Essentials

APRIL 30, 2022

Agile teams are described as “self-organizing” or “self-managing.” But what does that really mean? The terms are frequently used but not widely understood. For teams to “be” Agile, they need to know how to act. Behaviors describe actions. They are observable and universally evident to all team members. To “be” Agile, teams should identify and clearly label the desired actions and interactions.

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Project Management Essentials

APRIL 1, 2022

Economics is the social science that studies making choices subject to constraints. Project, program, and portfolio managers make economic decisions daily. We try to maximize value delivery subject to the constraints of time, cost, quality, risk, and resource availability. Economics can help project managers make more informed decisions. It provides frameworks to evaluate different options and.

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Project Management Essentials

MARCH 1, 2022

Excellent “soft skills” differentiate the great project managers. Since 90% of a project manager’s time is spent with others, it is no surprise that communications and emotional intelligence are vital traits. They are situationally aware, assess context, and communicate more effectively with their teams, customers, and stakeholders.

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Project Management Essentials

FEBRUARY 2, 2022

Let’s be honest, most project schedules disappoint. They are unrealistic, complicated, and do not help guide execution. For decades, Gantt charts, network diagrams, and the critical path method have been the standard practices. Even with these powerful tools, only about half of all projects are completed on time, as reported in the PMI Pulse of the Profession.

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Project Management Essentials

JANUARY 2, 2022

Project managers rarely face ethical dilemmas. We generally do not make life-or-death decisions or need to choose between “right” and “wrong.” However, we need to be prepared and have a framework for confronting these circumstances when they arise. My career is probably more colorful than most: I managed the United States Treasury securities’ auctions when the fabled investment firm.

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Project Management Essentials

NOVEMBER 30, 2021

Assumptions and risks are embedded in our daily lives. We expect the day will unfold as planned, and risks will not materialize. Most of these assumptions are benign, like thinking the weather report will be accurate; or no major calamities will occur. Projects are built on assumptions. Without them, it would be impossible to proceed. But some may lead to unanticipated or even tragic consequences.

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Project Management Essentials

NOVEMBER 1, 2021

Large enterprises struggle to manage their project portfolios effectively. They fall prey to the fallacy of optimizing resource allocation. Or simply stated, they focus on making sure everyone is busy rather than getting things done. Team members are allocated at least 100% to project work, if not more. As a result, people are working on multiple projects—more than they can realistically juggle.

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Project Management Essentials

OCTOBER 4, 2021

Selecting a project management approach and framework is complicated. Not that long ago, it was like buying a Model-T Ford; you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was black—our only option was Waterfall. Today Waterfall is still a choice. There are also multiple Agile frameworks, or you can mix-and-match and go Hybrid. So many choices.

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Project Management Essentials

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Project management theory established the Triple Constraint (aka, the Iron Triangle) as the key to project success. If the scope is known and fixed, then the schedule and cost must adjust to accommodate scope changes. The simplicity of this proposition is appealing. At the beginning of the project, all requirements are documented, the design is approved, and nothing should change.

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Project Management Essentials

AUGUST 2, 2021

Everyone tells me they are busy. They are on video or conference calls from morning until evening. On average, workers receive over 100 emails per day and send at least 40. A common complaint is, “I spend my entire day meeting and doing email; and have no time for my ‘real’ work.” After listening to a podcast on remote work, I reflected on my experience working with distributed teams in the 1990s.

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Project Management Essentials

JULY 1, 2021

Modern management theory is built on the premise of trust. If management creates a values-based culture, employees will make the “right” decisions. Douglas McGregor described Theory X (not trusting) and Y (trusting)managers. The 1950s were an inflection point where the nature of work and management practices began to shift. In the era of industrialization and mass production.

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Project Management Essentials

JUNE 3, 2021

The virtues of high-performing teams are well documented. They are 50% more productive. They are more creative, and members are 76% more likely to be engaged. Gallup studies of organizational performance find that companies with highly engaged employees are twice as likely to be successful. Specific performance metrics include: 17% increase in productivity, 10% increase in customer satisfaction.

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Project Management Essentials

MAY 2, 2021

The traditional definition of optics is the scientific study of sight or light. An alternative description relates to politics and refers to the perception of a situation. The political origin dates back to the Carter Administration when a Wall Street Journal editorial stated, “optics will not cure inflation.” Optics and the management of perceptions are not limited to politics.

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Project Management Essentials

APRIL 3, 2021

In one of my training classes, there is an exercise to conduct a daily stand-up meeting. The meeting should be no longer than 15-minutes and be well structured. In class, we challenge the leader with common distracting and unproductive behaviors. Watch the clip, the results are often hilarious. Disruptive and unproductive meetings are common and just do not happen in practice exercises.

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Project Management Essentials

MARCH 1, 2021

There are many tools to help project teams manage their work, collaborate, and track performance. The number of options is overwhelming— Capterra has published over 900-project management tool reviews. I teach project management classes and am often asked, “Which tool should we use?” My fundamental advice is to focus on your needs and select a tool that fits.

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