Earned Work: Measuring Project Performance
2 weeks 3 days agoEarned Work Management is a lightweight, approach-agnostic project performance measurement system that supports Waterfall, Scrum, and Kanban. This allows organizations employing different project approaches to measure project portfolio performance consistently.
Earned Work (EWM) measures project performance by analyzing Planned Work (PW) and completed or Earned Work (EW). Work is defined
Intentional Project Management
7 weeks 2 days agoMeteorologists are better at predicting the weather than project managers are at delivering projects. About a third of projects are delivered on time, on budget, and with the desired scope. By contrast, a seven-day forecast is accurate about
Scaling Your Project Management Career
11 weeks 1 day agoProject managers ascend the career ladder based on accumulated experience-derived wisdom and managing progressively larger and more complicated efforts. A typical trajectory involves moving from managing projects to programs, portfolios, and project management organizations. Success at one level is not a guarantee of success at the next. It is the classic case
Are We Aligned?
15 weeks 2 days agoStakeholder alignment—or lack thereof—can be the difference between project success and failure. In today’s dynamic business environment, projects face multiple stakeholders and constituencies. Often, these groups have competing or divergent interests.
Project managers often focus on the “hard skills” to ensure adherence to the triple constraints of scope, schedule, and cost.
Hybrid Project Management: Part 4, Picking the Practices
19 weeks 3 days agoHybrid projects are not constrained by a single methodology or well-defined framework. By definition, they are a melding melding of practices. A huge responsibility accompanies this unbounded freedom of choice. Project managers must clearly describe how the project will be executed to be successful.
Shirking this responsibility is detrimental.
Hybrid Project Management: Part 3, Picking the Approach
24 weeks 3 days agoA project manager’s first major decision is selecting the approach and lifecycle. Historically, this was a non-issue. The default option was preordained based on the project type, organizational preferences, and inertia.
Construction and engineering projects were always predictive. For software projects, organizational factors outside the project manager’s
Project Management Essentials
28 weeks 6 days agoI authored my first project management article 10 years ago. A mentor recommended I start writing to launch my transition from managing project organizations to teaching. Writing those early articles was challenging. Reducing complex ideas into writing is a skill requiring practice and discipline.
I did not anticipate having so much to say. However, project
Hybrid Project Management
37 weeks 5 days agoHybrid project management just had its breakout moment!
The Project Management Institute’s Pulse of the Profession® 2024 reported that hybrid (32%) is now the second most commonly used approach. Predictive (44
Project Data Visualization
41 weeks 7 hours agoA picture is worth a thousand words.
Projects can generate a lot of data. Large, mature organizations generally have the tools to capture, store, and analyze this information effectively. However, small and less mature organizations and those leading non-traditional efforts often lack the tools, practices, and experience.
I teach project fundamentals classes to non-
Project Decision-Making
46 weeks 1 day agoMaking good decisions is a critical project management skill. The challenge is to create a fair, efficient, effective, and transparent process for our teams and stakeholders. In a
