Projects are short-term efforts to create a unique product, service or environment, such as removing old servers, developing a custom e-commerce site, creating new desktop images or merging databases.
All projects are constrained by three factors: time, cost and scope. For a project to be successful, these three constraints (often called the Triple Constraints of Project Management) must be in equilibrium. If any constraint is out of balance, the project is heading for disaster.
All projects, IT or otherwise, move through five phases in the project management lifecycle: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. Each phase contains processes that move the project from idea to implementation.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Time Management
Thump off your work Overload. Increase Your Effectiveness. Achieve Much More.
This is a survey study to the professionals for retaining their prospective of the professional style in all concern. It has been taken from Mind Tools and composed for a readable version to get you personal time management skills. These are the simple, practical techniques that have helped the leading people in business; sport and public service reach the pinnacles of their careers.
Work Smarter
Take Control of Your Workload
Time Management Tools
1. Beating Procrastination
Manage Your Time. Get It All Done.
Why do we procrastinate?
In a nutshell, you procrastinate when you put off things that you should be focusing on right now.
How to Overcome Procrastination:
Whatever the reason behind procrastination, it must be recognized, dealt with and controlled before you miss opportunities or your career is derailed.
Step 1: Recognize that you're Procrastinating
If you're honest with yourself, you probably know when you're procrastinating.
Step 2: Work out WHY you’re Procrastinating
Why you procrastinate can depend on both you and the task. But it's important to understand what the reasons for procrastination are for each situation, so that you can select the best approach for overcoming your reluctance to get going.
Key points:
To have a good chance of conquering procrastination, you need to spot straight away that you're doing it. Then, you need to identify why you're procrastinating and taken appropriate steps to overcome the block.
Activity Logs
Find Out How You Really Spend Your Time
Key points:
Activity logs are useful tools for auditing the way that you use your time. They can also help you to track changes in your energy, alertness and effectiveness throughout the day.
Action Plans
Small Scale Planning
How to Use the Tool:
Wherever you want to achieve something significant then you have to draw up an Action Plan. This helps you think about what you need to do to achieve that thing, so that you can get help where you need it and monitor your progress.
Tips:
A useful mnemonic that you can use to help you check that you've remembered all the types of task that might be needed to meet your goal is SCHEMES. This stands for:
* Space
* Cash
* Helpers/people
* Equipment
* Materials
* Expertise
* Systems
You may not need all of them to meet some goals: a small internal project to streamline the format of your team's reports, for example, only requires "people", "expertise" and "systems".
Tip:
Action Plans are great for small projects, where deadlines are not particularly important or strenuous, and where you don't need to co-ordinate other people.
Key points:
An Action Plan is a list of things that you need to do to achieve a goal. To use it, simply carry out each task in the list
Using Your To-Do Lists
Different people use To-Do Lists in different ways in different situations: if you are in a sales-type role, a good way of motivating yourself is to keep your list relatively short and aim to complete it every day.
Key points:
Prioritized To-Do Lists are fundamentally important to efficient work. If you use To-Do Lists, you will ensure that:
* You remember to carry out all necessary tasks
* You tackle the most important jobs first, and do not waste time on trivial tasks.
* You do not get stressed by a large number of unimportant jobs.
This is a survey study to the professionals for retaining their prospective of the professional style in all concern. It has been taken from Mind Tools and composed for a readable version to get you personal time management skills. These are the simple, practical techniques that have helped the leading people in business; sport and public service reach the pinnacles of their careers.
Work Smarter
Take Control of Your Workload
Time Management Tools
1. Beating Procrastination
Manage Your Time. Get It All Done.
Why do we procrastinate?
In a nutshell, you procrastinate when you put off things that you should be focusing on right now.
How to Overcome Procrastination:
Whatever the reason behind procrastination, it must be recognized, dealt with and controlled before you miss opportunities or your career is derailed.
Step 1: Recognize that you're Procrastinating
If you're honest with yourself, you probably know when you're procrastinating.
Step 2: Work out WHY you’re Procrastinating
Why you procrastinate can depend on both you and the task. But it's important to understand what the reasons for procrastination are for each situation, so that you can select the best approach for overcoming your reluctance to get going.
Key points:
To have a good chance of conquering procrastination, you need to spot straight away that you're doing it. Then, you need to identify why you're procrastinating and taken appropriate steps to overcome the block.
Activity Logs
Find Out How You Really Spend Your Time
Key points:
Activity logs are useful tools for auditing the way that you use your time. They can also help you to track changes in your energy, alertness and effectiveness throughout the day.
Action Plans
Small Scale Planning
How to Use the Tool:
Wherever you want to achieve something significant then you have to draw up an Action Plan. This helps you think about what you need to do to achieve that thing, so that you can get help where you need it and monitor your progress.
Tips:
A useful mnemonic that you can use to help you check that you've remembered all the types of task that might be needed to meet your goal is SCHEMES. This stands for:
* Space
* Cash
* Helpers/people
* Equipment
* Materials
* Expertise
* Systems
You may not need all of them to meet some goals: a small internal project to streamline the format of your team's reports, for example, only requires "people", "expertise" and "systems".
Tip:
Action Plans are great for small projects, where deadlines are not particularly important or strenuous, and where you don't need to co-ordinate other people.
Key points:
An Action Plan is a list of things that you need to do to achieve a goal. To use it, simply carry out each task in the list
Using Your To-Do Lists
Different people use To-Do Lists in different ways in different situations: if you are in a sales-type role, a good way of motivating yourself is to keep your list relatively short and aim to complete it every day.
Key points:
Prioritized To-Do Lists are fundamentally important to efficient work. If you use To-Do Lists, you will ensure that:
* You remember to carry out all necessary tasks
* You tackle the most important jobs first, and do not waste time on trivial tasks.
* You do not get stressed by a large number of unimportant jobs.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Communication in Project Management
Last updated Jan 6, 2005.
This segment was written by Diane Altwies.
When I was studying for my PMP® Certification Exam, (Project Management Professional by Project Management Institute®) I learned that 90% of what a Project Manager does is communication. I didn't quite realize how true this statement was until I began consulting and teaching other project managers.
What is good communication? By definition, a sender forms a message and then sends that message to the receiver. In turn, the receiver converts the message in order to "understand" what is being sent and subsequently forms a response back to the sender.
It is that receipt back to the sender that is the critical component that can make or break good communication.
Although my expertise is in software development project management, over the past five years, I have had the opportunity to instruct Project Managers in many different industries. In doing so, I began to compare the differences and similarities of managing projects in a variety of industries and it actually surprised me to find that there are more similarities than differences. One critical similarity is that those project managers that focus on communication are much more successful than those that don't.
How many times have you heard—"Well, I told them, and they didn't do what I asked"? Whenever I hear someone say that, I ask them, "How many times and how many ways did you tell them?" Almost every time, the person looks at me quizzically. When they do, I take the opportunity to get on my soapbox to highlight some of the problems with their assumption. Here are four common problems I often see that undermine effective communications.
Sending an email and assuming that no response is an agreement.
In today's world of high technology, I have yet to find a person complain that they don't get enough email. Usually just the opposite is true. We are bombarded with emails from those who really have something to say, but unfortunately from people who have the desire to copy EVERYONE, and also from those that are just spamming. We as a culture have yet to master this technology, which can allow the truly important information to float to the top and the unimportant filtered out. It is a mistake on the sender's part to assume that the message has been heard without any response.
Holding a meeting to discuss the subject and have no minutes or results of the meeting to show for it.
We live in a fast-paced society and it seems like we are always on the go, from meeting to meeting. I'm not going to tell you that I myself have mastered this, but as the problems we solve get more and more complex, it is ever more important to document decisions and discussions and index them in order to quickly reference them when questions arise. I have seen prior decisions get unraveled and teams go through a long drawn out re-hashing of prior discussions ONLY to arrive back at the starting point from which we came. Wouldn't it have been easier to have reviewed prior minutes to understand how the decision came to be, first?
Assuming that if someone is nodding their head, that they understand.
This is not just a cultural issue, but a fact that many people in this world fear conflict and will nod their head in agreement only to undermine the decision once the meeting is over. Don't be fooled by a nod of the head. Work with each participant on obtaining that confirmation back that they understand the discussion or decision. Allow them the opportunity to ask questions. If an individual has a tendency to not want to speak up in meetings, work with that person individually to ensure their level of understanding.
Not using explicit and unambiguous communications.
Have you ever been in a meeting and someone is going on and on and on about a subject? Have you ever 'tuned' out only to have to ask the person state their position again? Wouldn't it be nice to state what needs to be stated—no more, no less? You may be surprised, but the English language is actually a better language than many languages in being more explicit and unambiguous.
Languages vary. The graph above shows that English is a "low context" language, whereas Arab and Japanese are more 'high context'. In a high context language, a word can be used in several ways; depending upon its 'context', the word will take on different meanings. This adds to the difficulty in communicating. The best thing you can do is to choose your words carefully and state concisely in order to minimize others 'tuning out'.
There have been studies made in how people learn best. It is a known fact that comprehension is at its "lowest" when reading. It improves when speaking and is most effective when actual application is performed. When presented with a situation in which it is difficult or impossible for team members to apply a concept, specifically in new technology design, the learning process is impeded as well as good communication. The best thing you can do to ensure good communication, is to tell them, tell them again, and then tell them once again.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
What is Project Management ?
To get the most out of Microsoft Project we need to first understand some common terms because ambiguity can cause confusion later as we move through how to use Microsoft Project.
Ambiguity is perhaps one of the greatest causes of failure of projects. Ambiguity causes scope creep, missed deadlines, run-away costs, under/over utilization of resources, and others. It's your job as project manager to identify and eliminate ambiguities, otherwise your project plan is nothing more than a guess.
Let's first look at what is and what is not a project. We'll use the definition of project from the Project Management Institute, which is:
A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.
A project is consider temporary since once the projects objectives are met, the project team will break-up and go onto other projects. The goal of a project is to create something new, or unique.
Elements of Project Management
All projects have three basic elements: tasks, resources and time. These are interrelated and any change in one has an effect on the other two. This is one area where Microsoft Project excels. Whenever you make any changes, the affect of those changes will become instantly visible through Microsoft Project's graphical presentation of your project.
Think of tasks as individual pieces of work which need to be done. Some typical tasks may include:
Resources are anything used to meet the stated goals of the project:
For time you originally start with an estimate (also know as a guess) on how long it may take to reach the stated goal of the project. As the project progresses, the time estimate becomes more solid as each piece of the project is examined and a more firm estimate as to how long it'll take to produce the individual pieces.
These three pieces are interrelated. If you think of the three as a triangle, in order for the triangle to remain balanced, any change on one side required changes on the other two. For example, if a new task is added to the project, you'll need a resources to work on this new task, and the new task may (or may not) affect the time side of the triangle .
It is within this area, the management of tasks, resources and time, that Microsoft Project excels and will help you to successfully manage your project...
Ambiguity is perhaps one of the greatest causes of failure of projects. Ambiguity causes scope creep, missed deadlines, run-away costs, under/over utilization of resources, and others. It's your job as project manager to identify and eliminate ambiguities, otherwise your project plan is nothing more than a guess.
Let's first look at what is and what is not a project. We'll use the definition of project from the Project Management Institute, which is:
A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.
A project is consider temporary since once the projects objectives are met, the project team will break-up and go onto other projects. The goal of a project is to create something new, or unique.
Elements of Project Management
All projects have three basic elements: tasks, resources and time. These are interrelated and any change in one has an effect on the other two. This is one area where Microsoft Project excels. Whenever you make any changes, the affect of those changes will become instantly visible through Microsoft Project's graphical presentation of your project.
Think of tasks as individual pieces of work which need to be done. Some typical tasks may include:
- Reports to management
- Pieces of code for an application
- Project definition documents
Resources are anything used to meet the stated goals of the project:
- People
- Machinery
- Money
For time you originally start with an estimate (also know as a guess) on how long it may take to reach the stated goal of the project. As the project progresses, the time estimate becomes more solid as each piece of the project is examined and a more firm estimate as to how long it'll take to produce the individual pieces.
These three pieces are interrelated. If you think of the three as a triangle, in order for the triangle to remain balanced, any change on one side required changes on the other two. For example, if a new task is added to the project, you'll need a resources to work on this new task, and the new task may (or may not) affect the time side of the triangle .
It is within this area, the management of tasks, resources and time, that Microsoft Project excels and will help you to successfully manage your project...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)