Most people working on projects realize that in the long run it is beneficial to work toward mutually satisfying solutions. Still, occasionally you encounter someone who has a dominant win/lose attitude about life and will be difficult to deal with. Fisher and Ury recommend that you use negotiation jujitsu when dealing with unreasonable people, such…
Tag: Project Management
Outsourcing Project Work – 7 Best Practices
This is the second part of a short guide on outsourcing. If you have landed on this article via a Google/Bing search then I encourage you to take a look at this article first and then follow the links to read the entire guide. This article describes some of the best practices I have observed…
Outsourcing Project Work – 4 Advantages and Disadvantages
This is the first part of a short guide on outsourcing. If you have landed on this article via a Google/Bing search then I encourage you to take a look at this article first and then come back to this one. Outsourcing Overview The term outsourcing has traditionally been applied to the transferring of business…
7 Easy Ways You Can Rejuvenate Your Project Team
Over the course of a long project, a team sometimes drifts off course and loses momentum. The project manager needs to swing into action to realign the project team with the project objectives and step on the pedal. What options are there for the project team? There are both formal and informal solutions. Informal actions:…
What If Costs, Not Time, Is the Issue?
In today’s fast-paced world, there appears to be a greater emphasis on getting things done quickly. Still, organizations are always looking for ways to get things done while reducing costs. This is especially true for fixed-bid projects, where profit margin is derived from the difference between the bid and actual cost of the project. Every…
6 Methods to Build The Perfect Project Cost Duration Graph
This article is the third part in a miniseries on building a project cost duration graph. The first part can be found here and the second part here. If you have already read them please ignore this paragraph. If not I would encourage you to read them first as they will provide you with a…
9 Easy Ways to Speed Up Project Delivery
This is the message sent to the Government in a keynote speech by the recently appointed HS2 Chairman Sir David Higgins in Manchester on Monday as he delivered his long awaited review, HS2 Plus, of the mega project’s direction, costs and project delivery method. The best way of keeping costs down for the £50 billion…
Building High Performance Teams: Recruiting Team Members
Project managers play a key role in developing high performance teams. They recruit members, conduct meetings, establish a team identity, create a common sense of purpose or a shared vision, manage a reward system that encourages teamwork, orchestrate decision making, resolve conflicts that emerge within the team, and rejuvenate the team when energy wanes. Project…
Project Team Synergy: How to Deliver High Performance
There is positive and negative project team synergy. The magic and power of project teams is captured in the term “synergy,” which is derived from the Greek word sunergos: “working together.” The difference in productivity between an average project team synergy and a turned-on, high-performing project team is not 10 percent, 20 percent, or 30…
The Punctuated Equilibrium Model of Group Development
Starting from Gersick’s research, stating that groups don’t develop in a universal sequence of stages as suggested by the five-phase model. Her research, which is based on the systems concept of punctuated equilibrium group development, found that the timing of when groups form and actually change the way they work is highly consistent. The Punctuated…