Guild of Project Controls: Compendium | Roles | Assessment | Certifications | Membership

Why Tasks Should be Banned from Project Scheduling Tools

9 years 19 weeks ago

My best friend and I meet up once every year and we invariably end up chatting about our mutual passion for project planning. His view is a little extreme but one with enough merit to warrant discussion: “Ban activities and tasks from scheduling tools…” he says. For those of you who use scheduling tools such as MS Project or similar, you will know this is verging on project planning blasphemy

Read more...
 

Planning By Consensus

9 years 19 weeks ago

So much hinges on the project schedule, yet so few team members contribute to it. Whatsmore, they typically don’t care about critical paths, constraints and other building blocks; they just want to know “what, where and when.” We’re overdue for consensus-based planning tools that bridge execution and analytics.

Globally recognized project analytics thought leader and software entrep…

Read more...
 

Portfolio Management - The elephant in the room

9 years 20 weeks ago

Is this you?

You’re stretched across too many projects.

Not only that, but you’re frustrated that there are quite a few projects in the company that seem to have little benefit, and yet they just drift on.

Worse still, these projects tie up precious time and money that you believe could be diverted to something more worthwhile.

-

If the above

Read more...
 

The problem with CPM

9 years 25 weeks ago

Projects are routinely finishing late. Whilst many have no effective schedule controls a significant proportion do outlay significant amounts of money on scheduling software and people to operate the computer systems and still finish late.  The simple fact is most schedulers have no effect on the management of the projects they are working on - they are either there to comply with client

Read more...
 

Controlling complex projects

9 years 30 weeks ago

Complexity is not a synonym for complicated or large is just one of the dimensions inherent in every project.  The four basic dimensions of a project[1] are:

  • Its
Read more...
 

Why are so many projects set up to fail?

9 years 38 weeks ago

Project failure rates have remained steady for at least the last 30 years. Books’ Law was published in 1975[1], Cobbs Paradox was coined in 1995

Read more...
 

Predicting project completion

9 years 42 weeks ago

Working out the probable completion date for a project and understanding the risks associated with achieving a target date have always been difficult.  This article will take a quick look at the evolution of the techniques through to the current state of research reported at the Project Governance and Controls Symposium earlier this month.

Bar charts have been around for some 200

Read more...
 

Risks don’t add up

9 years 50 weeks ago

The way PMI deals with risk in the PMBOK® Guide is simplistic. Calculating the effect of one risk using the suggested probability x severity calculation provides one value.  For example, if there is an 20% probability an estimate is under valued by $50,000 the Expected Monetary Value (EMV) for this event will be:
  -$50,000 x 0.2 = -$10,000   it is simple but

Read more...
 

Breakdown Structures Revisited

10 years 1 day ago

Breakdown structures are central to the practice of project management and have their origins in the industrial revolution.  In the ‘Wealth of Nations’ Smith advocated breaking the production of goods into tiny tasks that can be undertaken by people following simple instructions. ‘Why hire a talented pin maker when ten factory workers using machines and working together can

Read more...
 

Are numbers real?

10 years 5 weeks ago

As planners we use numbers every day of the week but how real are they?

In the western world, numbers in the form we know and use today appeared in the 13th century when Leonardo Pisano Bigollo (c. 1170 – c. 1250), known as Fibonacci an Italian mathematician, published the Liber Abaci (1202). In the book, Fibonacci advocated numeration with the digits

Read more...
 

Market Place

Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project books, on-line video training courses and training material available from an internationally recognised publisher. Teach yourself using on-line or book based learning or run your own in-house or public courses.