Recall from this post what project manager must need – the project management knowledge, to be able to perform using this knowledge and personal skills to deal with people involved with the project.
While PMBOKĀ®’s processes provide the required knowledge, application of this knowledge delivers performance.
Below are 11 soft skills essential for success as a project manager.
1. Leadership
“Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes.”
– Peter Drucker [continue reading…]
If you thought getting the right team is the crucial part, you were right. And even more crucial is keeping them motivated, helping them update their skills, collaborate with rest of the team members to best of their ability and strive towards achieving project objectives with positive energy. To develop team is to enormously enhance the odds of project success.
Developing project team is a project management activity that is about creating a conducive project environment where team members will cooperate and collaborate well with each other, improve their skills and competencies and work in unison towards achieving project’s objectives.
A collaborative team can leverage team synergy to achieve seemingly impossible tasks. Such an environment is a great boon for junior members to learn new stuff without impacting project output, an opportunity for the senior members to mentor juniors, and ideal scenario for new members coming into the team to get up to speed on their work. [continue reading…]
This is a part-post from Developing Project Schedule project management activity post. You will learn how to calculate critical path, float/slack, early & late starts, and early & late finishes of a network path in this article.
For easier understanding this post is divided into four parts that can be navigable at the bottom of each part.
I suggest you get yourself a cup of your favorite beverage (I was going to say Coffee), this one is going to be a long ride. š
As we saw in Developing Project Schedule project management activity, Critical path is made up of series of activities from beginning to the end, where each activity has a dependency over previous activity in such a way that delay in any one activity causes delay in all subsequent activities, causing the project to slip.
Click here to get my PMP exam brain-dump for free.
In other words, critical path is the longest path in your project’s schedule network diagram, and is the SHORTEST possible duration for the project.
How to Calculate Critical Path
Let us take a simpler example than John’s home construction example we saw in previous lessons.
This project involves assembling a train set. [continue reading…]
What is the single most important document you need to run a project?
Project plan? May be. Project schedule? Possibly. š
Project Plan is like planning for the journey. Preventive maintenance of car, filling up gas, booking beach side vacation home, taking driving directions and route-map, packing bags, and stocking eatables for the journey.
Schedule is what you need when you actually start the journey. Knowing when to change gears, accelerate, brake, stop at gas station, refer to the route-map.
Steps to develop schedule can be tricky, and this post shows the right approach to it.
In this post we are going to cover –
- How all Schedule management activities done so far comes together to produce the backbone of a project – Project Schedule
- How the project schedule is developed using schedule method, tool, and model
- 5 types of schedule
- Critical path method (CPM) and Critical chain method (CCM)
- Resource optimization techniques
- How Leads and Lags are used when you develop schedule
- How you can compress schedule without impacting critical path (and a mnemonic to remember it!)
- How scheduling is done in Agile projects
- and then some more!
This is a historic moment in your project – gathering all the ingredients to chalk out a schedule for your project.
Get a cup of coffee, sit back, and let’s get started! [continue reading…]
“An additional 1.57 million new project management roles will be created globally every year until 2020, according to the Project Management Talent Gap Report, a 2012 study by PMI and Anderson Economic Group.
And although there’s no shortage of available labor, four in five organizations are already struggling to find qualified project managers to fill open positions, says PMI’s 2013 Pulse of the Professionā¢ In-Depth Report: Talent Management.”
– Reports PM NetworkĀ®’s Mind The Gap series (Click here to read excepts)
Click here to read the report – 2013 Pulse of the Professionā¢ In-Depth Report: Talent Management. [continue reading…]
Since PMBOK 6th version, the word ‘resources’ indicate team (people) as well as physical (equipment, servers, tools, infrastructure…) resource needed for the team. Thus when you acquire resources for your project, you are putting to use two different set of skills as a project manager – how to hire people, and how to grab hold of physical resources.
“The staffing ramp-up plan is to start with a Technical architect and one Senior Engineer, from the first of March for a 8-week period to complete the technical feasibility study and design phase.
I will be doing requirements collection and product definition for the first 4 weeks during this phase. Post design phase we will be adding two junior engineers and one senior engineer every 8 weeks till end of December.
This team will then run for next 5 months and then we move towards production release. We will start reducing team size from there, starting with the Architect, over a period of 3 months. We will end with 4 member support team”, said Steve, presenting his staffing plan to the project sponsor and internal stakeholders. [continue reading…]
