The project management industry is evolving at a faster rate each year, both in technologies and methodologies. The environment continues to influence how organizations manage projects. Here are some project management trends for 2015 to help you prepare for what’s ahead. Project Management Trends 1.Less Waterfall, more Agile 2015 will bring even more Agile practices…
Kanban Project Management
Lean sounds a bit abstract on its own, but combine it with Kanban project management and it’s easy to build your own Lean project management system. Conceived by Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno and implemented in 1953, Kanban is set up much like a factory floor, where a part might start out as a piece of…
Six Sigma Project Management
Motorola wasn’t about to let the auto industry take all the credit for project management innovation, so decades after Toyota’s introduction of Kanban, the mobile phone company’s engineer Bill Smith created Six Sigma in 1986. It’s a more structured version of Lean than Kanban, one that sets specific stages and adds in more planning to…
Skills a project manager should nurture
Chapter 9 of a much more comprehensive post Project Management Starting Out Guide. Let’s get right in and discover the areas where an aspiring project manager should focus. Developing the right skills is crucial to your success. Project Manager Skills An innate leader by innate leader, I mean one appointed by their peers, rather than…
Develop Project Management SMART Objectives
“There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives” by George T. Doran was the first reference of the term in the November 1981 issue of Management Review. It focused on the importance of objectives and the difficulty of setting them. The first use of the SMART objectives criteria was by Peter Drucker in his management by objectives concept. SMART…
The Need for an Effective Project Portfolio Management System
Implementation of projects without a strong priority system linked to strategy creates problems. Three of the most obvious project portfolio management problems are discussed below. A project portfolio management system can go a long way to reduce, or even eliminate, the impact. Portfolio Management key questions How can the implementation gap be narrowed so that…
Project Life Cycle
One way of illustrating the unique nature of project work is in terms of the project life cycle. Some project managers find it useful to use the project life cycle as the cornerstone for managing projects. The life cycle recognizes that projects have a limited life span and that there are predictable changes in level of…
Traditional Project Management
Perhaps the most obvious way to break up your projects into a workflow, traditional project management is often referred to as “waterfall” project management because it handles one thing after another in a linear order. Think of it like your favorite mobile game, such as Candy Crush: you can’t unlock the next level until you’ve…
PRINCE2
What is PRINCE2? PRINCE2 (an acronym for PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a de facto process-based method for effective project management. Used extensively by the UK Government, PRINCE2 is also widely recognised and used in the private sector, both in the UK and internationally. The PRINCE2 method is in the public domain and offers non-proprietorial…
What is a project? Definition, Elements, Stages
From what I have experienced so far, there is a lot of confusion related to what is a project and what is not a project. So I just feel that I should write down a few ideas to clarify it. So let’s start at the outset and zoom in on the issues. What do these…