Project Recovery. Are You a Project Driver or Enabler? Project managers are tasked with many simultaneous responsibilities. They manage and drive the delivery of a project while managing their team to deliver results according to the business expectations, on time and on budget. It's no small feat when this is accomplished seamlessly. As a project manager, many times I find myself to be the driver, serving as the catalyst for movement and action. A driver is someone who takes on the responsibility and accountability for the project deliverables. Enablers act as complements to the driver.
Enablers add life and color to the project. The great value of project managers serving as enablers is that -- when combined with their authority, they are able to drive the project and enable their teams to deliver higher quality projects and longer lasting results. Are you an enabler or a driver? 7 Essential Project Planning Documents. Solid project planning is a prerequisite for project success. Poor planning, meanwhile, can lead to missed deadlines, budget overruns, poor quality deliverables, frustrated project teams and even project failure. In my previous post, I offered five steps to assist in planning the project-planning phase.
One of those steps involved preparing planning documents. To foster a successful planning phase, here are seven planning documents I believe most project managers will find indispensable. This list certainly might vary depending on the project setup, project size, complexity and organizational planning guidelines. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Start with this checklist when you sit down to plan for your next project-planning phase. Revisit this planning exercise, learn from it and enhance it, to continuously improve your project planning skills. What project planning documents do you find indispensable? See other posts from Marian. Ask Good Questions to Ensure Project Governance. Effective project management governance is becoming an important topic at all levels of many organizations. Project governance focuses on making sure the whole of an organization's project management system is effectively supporting its strategy. Good governance requires that the governing board sets the strategy and provides direction -- and not become involved in the day-to-day management of the organization.
It's up to the organization's managers to implement the strategy and provide the board with the necessary assurances, information and advice needed to support the governance process. Good governance and optimum performance should be synonymous. The directors need to ask their executive managers the right questions and the managers need to develop efficient systems that deliver the right answers. In other words, if you don't ask the right questions, you are unlikely to get the information you need to make good decisions.
Some key questions to ask include: Empower Project Team Members. Project teams are built of people with multiple layers of skills and competencies. A few will be selected as project leads to have less responsibility than a project manager, but more than a team member. Project leads ensure smooth task management and reporting flow, but how many of them are allowed or trusted to make decisions? What level of decisions can they make? The key to empowering a team member lies in the project manager's ability to get to know the person's strengths and weaknesses. In one of my earlier posts, I talked about delegating work to team members as a way to help them succeed. When empowering team members, the same rules apply. First, select someone with a suitable background and competencies. When you empower team members by giving them greater responsibility, you can significantly improve the way a project is managed.
What decisions do you trust your team members to make? Coach Your Project Teams by Example. Finding the Shortest Path to Project Success. What's the shortest possible path from project initiation to completion? You might say it depends on the size of the project or the work involved. But there's always a shorter path than the one you have in mind -- even for larger projects. There's always a solution that makes better use of resources while providing faster delivery times.
It's like when you play Scrabble® and come up with a word combination that uses the fewest letters and still gives you the highest point value. Say you walked into a job interview, for example, and you were hired on the spot. Although it seems impossible to get hired just by walking into the room, it's the ability to recognize the possibility that allows you to open yourself up to ideas that you'd otherwise discount.
So what's wrong with the way you currently manage a project from initiation to completion? Try asking these questions to help you create the space in which actions towards the shortest path will arise: SirGanttalot. Time-driven projects. MS Project, Lead & Lag. When you set up task dependencies (task dependencies: A relationship between two linked tasks; linked by a dependency between their finish and start dates. There are four kinds of task dependencies: Finish-to-start [FS], Start-to-start [SS], Finish-to-finish [FF], and Start-to-finish [SF].), there may be some successor (successor: A task that cannot start or finish until another task starts or finishes.) tasks that can start before their predecessor (predecessor: A task that must start or finish before another task can start or finish.) tasks are finished, and other successor tasks that cannot be started until after a delay that follows the conclusion of their predecessor tasks: Lead time This is an overlap between two tasks that are linked by a dependency.
For example, if a task can start when its predecessor is half finished, you can establish a finish-to-start dependency and specify a lead time of 50% for the successor task. You enter the lead time as a negative value. Notes. MS Project, EVM. You may have heard that earned value analysis is complicated.
But aside from the many acronyms, it's not. And it can help you answer questions like, "Is there enough money left in the budget? " and, "Will we finish on time? " Want to know more about how Project handles earned value analysis? What is earned value analysis? What else does earned value measure? How do I interpret earned value? How does % complete versus physical % complete affect earned value?
Which earned value quantities can I show or calculate in Project? Where in Project do I see earned value data? What is earned value analysis? At the root of earned value analysis are three fundamental values calculated for each task (task: An activity that has a beginning and an end. With me, so far? Earned value analysis is always specific to a status date you choose. Here is one example of how to analyze project performance with earned value analysis. One common way of visualizing the key values of earned value analysis is to use a chart. MS Project, dependencies. After tasks (task: An activity that has a beginning and an end.
Project plans are made up of tasks.) are created in a project, they need to be linked (linking: In a project, establishing a dependency between tasks. Linking tasks defines a dependency between their start and finish dates. In OLE, establishing a connection between programs so that data in one document is updated when it changes in another.) to show relationships between them. Linking tasks creates task dependencies (task dependencies: A relationship between two linked tasks; linked by a dependency between their finish and start dates. There are four kinds of task dependencies: Finish-to-start [FS], Start-to-start [SS], Finish-to-finish [FF], and Start-to-finish [SF].). Tip You can also show the relationships between multiple projects by linking tasks across projects, or by using inter-project dependencies. In this article About linking tasks Top of Page Link tasks by using the Gantt Chart view Turn autolinking on or off.