Managing Project Assumptions & Risks
1 year 35 weeks agoWe make hundreds of assumptions and take small risks daily. Without them, we would spend innumerable hours worrying about everything. We assume our car will start. Our air conditioner will work. The weather forecast is accurate.
These daily assumptions are banal. Recovering from these risks may be inconvenient but not horribly
Project Success: Implementation AND Adoption
1 year 40 weeks agoSoftware projects have two measures of success. First, building and implementing working software. Second, having people use and adopt it. Project managers tend to focus their attention on delivering the application. But the project’s real success rests on user adoption.
Once, I led a large project. The application was
Display Variance against Multiple Baselines in Microsoft Project
1 year 48 weeks agoDo you want to carry out variance analysis against more than one baselines in Microsoft Project but cannot find a way to do so out of the box?
Custom Field is my go to feature whenever I need a workaround in Microsoft Project and again they have come to the rescue. In this YouTube video, I demonstrate how to calculate and display variances against multiple baselines (Baseline1 to
Everyday Agile Practices
1 year 49 weeks agoAgile seems like a mystery to many. It has an unfamiliar vocabulary and practices. To outsiders, it feels like an exclusive club. However, when we step back and inspect agile, we see that it follows common, recognizable patterns from our daily lives.
Imagine it is Thursday evening. Your family is planning the upcoming weekend. There is a
Everyday Agile Practices
1 year 49 weeks agoAgile seems like a mystery to many. It has an unfamiliar vocabulary and practices. To outsiders, it feels like an exclusive club. However, when we step back and inspect agile, we see that it follows common, recognizable patterns from our daily lives.
Imagine it is Thursday evening. Your family is planning the upcoming weekend. There is a
Add a milestone on a Task bar in Microsoft Project
2 years 3 weeks agoThis YouTube video demonstrates one way to add a milestone on a Microsoft Project Task bar (same row), e.g., Stage Gate, Go-Live date or a Decision Point.
Note that for this solution to work, the Task Mode must be set to Auto Scheduled.
The Project Charter Lays the Foundation
2 years 4 weeks agoThe project charter is a foundational deliverable created during the project’s initiation phase. The charter documents the project’s purpose, planned direction, and what is initially known.
It may be called a charter, proposal, grant, or request. It may be a formal contract or a less formal document. Regardless of the format, articulating the project’s intent
Quick way to find P6 Activities with Lag
2 years 6 weeks agoFinding relationship lags between activities in Primavera P6 is not as straightforward as one would like it to be. Out of the box, you either manually check each activity’s relationship or create a report detailing lags.
But what if you want to apply a filter to a layout? The workaround in this video shows how to create a filter for displaying only activities with lags or leads in a
2 Ways to Create Level of Effort or Hammock Tasks in Microsoft Project
2 years 9 weeks agoWhile Microsoft Project does not have a straight of the vbox Level of Effort activity type like primavera P6, you can still add Hammock or Level of Effort tasks to your Microsoft Project schedule, using one of 2 workarounds.
The first workaround is the recommended method from Microsoft while the second method is one that is very common in the subsea construction world.
Milestone-Kanban: A Hybrid Project Scheduling Technique
2 years 9 weeks agoThe Milestone-Kanban Schedule (MKS) is a hybrid project scheduling and management technique that combines traditional and agile best practices. The technique is well-suited for simple and complicated projects where the required deliverables are clear, but the time and effort needed to create them are not. It embraces iterative planning, uses milestones to establish a
