Getting-started | Vertabase Blog

Jul 21, 2009
2 comments

Getting Buy-In for Project Management: How to Achieve Transparency

One of the first steps to getting buy-in for more project management is to make the need apparent.

The first step to achieving this transparency is to put together a list of every single project that’s being requested, match it with the departments or people involved in making that project happen, and matching it, as well, with the requestors.

This simple list will show you how many total projects there are on the table, how many projects are requested by each requestor and how many projects each department has to be involved with.

For an average size group the number of requested projects is generally in the 50 to 150 project range -with the lion’s share of the projects touching IT and/or a marketing or art department. Summarize these statistics and share them with key decision makers. It provides a simple but powerful view on everything going on within a group.

By seeing the amount of requested activity it should highlight the need to prioritize projects, really ask the requestors which are the most important projects to get done and to track the progress of projects by department so that the decision makers and key stakeholders can have visibility into how shared resources (namely IT, marketing, HR, procurement etc.) are being spent.

Project management as a practice and project management software as a tool can help facilitate this transparency and present it in a non-threatening way.

Feb 24, 2009
4 comments

Project Management: Getting Started with Estimated Hours

One helpful piece of information to get on a project is estimated hours per task. This is a measure of how much work or effort a particular task will take. Not to be confused with due date (when a task will be done), estimated hours is a reflection of how much of a person’s time the task will take. Knowing this will help you better allocate that person’s time. It will make it easier to juggle tasks across projects and plan out people’s workload.

Getting estimated hours from internal staff can sometimes be hard. First off, people may worry that if they tell you it will take 8 hours, you’ll be mad when its not done by the end of the day. They might also be afraid that if it takes them longer then the estimate, they’ll be penalized. These fears can keep people from giving estimates.

Read the rest of this post »

Feb 19, 2009
Post a Comment

Project Management: Getting Started

The first, and often hardest, step to starting with project management is creating a task list. Many people try to think of everything that goes into a project or job, write that down, then want to capture the changes between one job and the other by tracking which were the specific tasks that were different.

The idea behind this is that people want to better visualize their process so they can track how different reality is from the plan, where delay’s happen and where they can improve things. The problem with this approach is that no two jobs are ever the same. No two, super-detailed lists are ever going to be the same. You’ll spend more time changing the plan then recording data.

Read the rest of this post »