Good communication is a key factor in successful project management, particularly when it comes to scheduling.
This applies to project managers, team members and business managers.
Sometimes people can be vague or non-committal when asked about their time or scheduling expectations. There are responses phrased to show flexibility or eagerness like “let me know what works for you.” There are polite, deferential answers like “don’t move things just for me.”
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Wal-Mart.
Whether you love them or hate them, there’s no denying their scale. The company is just huge. When they make a small change, it can have large-scale implications.
When Wal-Mart Changes A Light Bulb
Hal Macomber has a post up that cites an upcoming Fast Company article that covers Wal-Mart’s anticipated change to using coiled fluorescent bulbs instead of standard incandescent bulbs.
Its estimated that if Wal-Mart can successfully do so, that would be the equivalent of pulling 1.3 million cars off the road in terms of reducing carbon emissions.
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Project planning is often taken for granted by people in charge of projects (in an everyday, business sense) -or by their bosses. They overlook the need develop a deliberate and disciplined approach to spelling out tasks, personnel and resources on a project by project basis.
This may come from a mix-up in the way people talk about planning and project plans.
There are two different ways of looking at project plans and the act of planning.
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There are two ways to manage a project: with brute force and with finesse.
Brute force managers are like rock climbers who uses their arms to pull themselves up a wall. It can get you there if you have the strength, but it sure is tiring and ugly.
Project managers who use finesse are like climbers who realize that their can legs do most of the vertical lifting. They just need to use their head to find the right placement. Climbing with their legs (which are stronger than arms), using their hands mostly for balance, they can climb a lot higher, for a lot longer and its much prettier to see.
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I have the pleasure of speaking to hundreds of people looking for project management software every month, and what I find amazing is the great difference in the way they are all working from one another. When I started speaking to people about their project management needs, I believed for the most part that everyone would basically be working in a very similar fashion. After all, we all put on our shoes basically the same way, brush our teeth, and walk upright as we move from place to place. But the more I spoke with potential customers, the more they kept asking me about very specific software functionalities. The first part of the question does your software do x and then y and then z, is followed by surprise when I answer that no, no one else has ever asked about that feature before. “Really?!” Is a classic response and they pause in disbelief.
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BusinessWeek Online has an interesting article about failure. It cites a couple of high profile successes (like Bill Gates and Abraham Lincoln) that had failed businesses early in their careers. It then goes on to talk about making business failures more productive through analysis and review.
The same holds true in projects. A huge number of projects “fail” in that they don’t meet original expectations, timelines or budgets. Sometimes they even fail by not producing the expected deliverable. Good project management can help minimize these kind of failures. But even the best team or is not going to bat 1000.
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There is a ton of confusion in the project management software market. A simple search on the term turns up hundreds of software packages. They range from high-end, super engineering type products which can be used to build bridges to simpler products which can make life easier for a two person design studio. How come there is so much confusion? How can someone get a handle on the type of product they need?
Part of the confusion stems from the definition of a project in itself. The Project Management Institute defines a project as “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique project, service, or result.” This mean it has a clear start and end-date and will deliver a product or service different from other products or services already offered. It means that the activities involved and the deliverables are unique and non-recurring. According to this definition, the more standard that tasks and deliverables become, the more the project becomes “operations.”
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