Since estimating efforts cost money, the time and detail devoted to bottom up estimates is an important decision. Yet, when estimating is considered, you as a project manager may hear statements such as these: Rough order of magnitude is good enough. Spending time on detailed estimating wastes money. Time is everything; our survival depends on…
Tag: Project Management
Top Down Estimates
Since estimating efforts cost money, the time and detail devoted to estimating is an important decision. Yet, when bottom up or top down estimates are considered, you as a project manager may hear statements such as these: Rough order of magnitude is good enough. Spending time on detailed estimating wastes money. Time is everything; our…
Influencing time, resources and cost estimates quality
A typical statement in the field is the desire to “have a 95 percent probability of meeting time and cost estimates.” Past experience is a good starting point for developing time and cost estimates. But past experience estimates must almost always be refined by other considerations to reach the 95 percent probability level. Factors affecting…
Organizational Culture Implications on Projects
Project managers must be aware that their actions will have some organizational culture implications. First, they have to interact with the culture of their parent organization as well as the subcultures of various departments (e.g., marketing, accounting). Second, they have to interact with the project’s client or customer organizations. Finally, they have to interact in…
Organizational Culture, How to Define, Implement and Nurture
The decision for combining a discussion of project management structures (you can read it here) and organizational culture can be traced to a conversation I had with two project managers who work for a medium-sized IT firm. They were developing a new operating platform that would be critical to the future success of their company.…
Project Plan, is it important to have one?
Well, every course, article and training provider out there is stressing about the importance of having a project plan. It’s as simple as that. A project plan will help you plan, execute and control your project, at least that is the official definition. I will like to state my personal view on the subject as…
Functional Organizational Structure
One approach to organizing projects is to simply manage them within the existing functional organizational structure hierarchy of the organization. Once management decides to implement a project, the different segments of the project are delegated to the respective functional units with each unit responsible for completing its segment of the project (see figure below). Coordination…
Organizational Structure: Do You Belong?
Once management approves a project then the question becomes, how will the project be implemented. This article examines three different organizational structure mechanics used by firms to implement projects: functional organization, dedicated project teams, and matrix structure. Although not exhaustive, these organizational structures and their variant forms represent the major approaches for organizing projects. The advantages…
PRINCE2 and Scrum, Integration
There are some papers out there that reference a possible integration between PRINCE2 and SCRUM. While I do agree and feel that it is possible and even recommended I feel that the subject has net been treated with sufficient depth. Most of the papers suggest that the PRINCE2 process ‘Managing Product Delivery’ is place where…
Implementing Scrum: Challenges
Organizations that want to make a move to Agile will need to fully understand what is Agile and what challenges are likely to appear on the road to implementing SCRUM. There are a lot of examples where Agile implementations have gone awry and it is costly on so many levels. Implementing SCRUM is not that easy and it…