The PMO in the Sky
With the rapid onset of cloud computing, the main question I have been asking myself lately is, “Has the project manager’s role kept up?” We
July 14, 2016
Category: Project Management
OneNote – Microsoft’s Much Ignored Power Add-In
My first experience working with OneNote was about 5 years ago at a large corporation. This company fell under Sarbanes-Oxley rules, and as such everything was in the public domain: meeting notes, invites, emails, everything. It was used by everybody and everybody felt it was a chore to use.
May 9, 2016
The Agile Calendar
The Agile Calendar was built based on the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html), and like the manifesto, contains 12 themes, or principals. Here I am going to go over some of the highlights. For a full view of the manifesto, and other questions you may have, I will be delivering a session called “What You Want to Know About Agile, But Are Afraid to Ask,” at our KTL User Conference 2016 in May at the Microsoft Center in Reston, Virginia, (tickets for the free event can be found here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/11th-annual-user-conference-tickets-19015933168).
April 13, 2016
Banish The Creep
Scope Creep is defined as the scope of a project (the original design, concept, or plan) begins to change without managed control. This can lead to a project going over budget, taking more time, and not being what the customer agreed to or agreed to pay for.
March 8, 2016
Five Things to Watch for in 2016 for Project Managers
1. Risk Management Will Become A Buzzword Of 2016
With the increase in globalization in the project management industry, we are seeing projects impacted by the likes of industrialization, weather, and even terrorism on our day-to-day lives. With the growth of Agile, project managers can begin to leverage risk analysis and become more proactive in their responses. There are many tools to choose from in the market place, but the skilled professional will constantly sharpen their skills in order to prevent or leverage risk.
January 25, 2016
How To Do a Project Gap Analysis
Gap Analysis is a strategic planning tool to help understand where a project is, where it needs to be, and how to get there.
For a simplistic take, here is a project chart showing project status:
January 11, 2016
How to Avoid a Bad Project
Do you ever feel out of control of your project?
Over the past 27 years, I have worked on over 500 large scale projects. Within these 500+ projects, I have taken an interest in listening to client’s and other project professional’s previous experiences about projects that have gone bad. In these conversations, we can learn from failures and plan for better success in the future. But to be quite honest, I will do anything I can to prevent a project that I am working on from “going bad”. With that being said, there are some things that are outside of my control. As much as I want the project to be successful—I do need the client to be in control of the right things.
January 6, 2016
The Importance of Requirements Gathering for Software Projects
Requirements are an essential part of any software project and the foundation on which all projects should be built. The gathering of and compiling of requirements for a software project is very much a partnership between the user of the software and the developer. Obviously the customer or software user needs to communicate to the developer what they need, but at the same time the developer needs to be able to anticipate needs and ask the right questions during the requirements gathering phase of a project.
October 14, 2015
Why Did We Miss Those Requirements?
How does your end-user derive true value from the product/service you provide? The end-user doesn’t care too much if the product/server was delivered within budget or on-time. They are most concerned and get the best benefit as long as their requirements have been met in its entirety.
October 9, 2015
Critical Path and Why is it Important?
In my formative years as a business analyst, I was once summoned by my project manager into the war room while working on an eCommerce project for one of my company’s high profile clients. We were about 2 months away the launch date and the PM asked us for the critical path. My first question (to myself) was, “what in the world is a critical path and why is the PM asking me this.”
Here is how I interpreted that question, “well.. the project is critical to my organization, it is critical to succeed, so everything on this project is the critical path”.
September 3, 2015
