Yesterday we saw how projects can fail if you don't know what your objectives are. Today it's .. Team unsure of project deliverables How will you know you've achieved the objectives? Answer, by understanding what the project will deliver in specific terms. Make sure that everyone knows what your team will be delivering, how and [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Project Management category.
Why projects fail – top 5 reasons
Why do projects fail? And how on earth can you make sure that your project doesn't fail? Simple answer – you can't. But you can improve your chances of success dramatically, by considering some of the reasons that projects go wrong, and avoiding them – easy! I know this sounds like a bit of back-to-front [...]
Why get interested in project management?
Over the last few years there's been a dramatic change in the way voluntary sector organisations have had to operate. Funding patterns changed dramatically with a larger proportion allocated to discrete projects and the level of professionalism expected from third sector organisations has risen. We need to operate in a professional manner, and also show [...]
It’s time to get out of project management when….
You refer to your other half as the budget holder. Your personal life is planned to the nth degree. You write a project Contract for your next holiday. Safe sex involves a risk log and contingency plan. You organise your family into a more efficient team based structure. The "deliverables" for Saturday are the shopping [...]
Abbreviations that made me laugh
Who says project management (and other sorts of work) shouldn't be fun? Here are some TLAs I've come across which made me smile – I hope they do the same for you. As I've collected these over the years, I've no idea where they first came from, so I can't acknowledge them. NB only read [...]
DKWTFIF
This strange label is one of the most useful labels for files that I've ever come across. It stands for "Don't Know Where To File It File" It's a real cop-out and if you have such a file it will be small, because you will go to it frequently and deal with the contents properly [...]
10 signs you are a serious project manager
If you exhibit any of these signs….. ….be afraid. Be very afraid. Becoming tired of having a social life beyond work. Spending hours planning and re-planning a Friday night out. Thinking Rommel would have been more effective if he'd used a Gantt chart. Using so much jargon customers think you're speaking a foreign language. Organising [...]
The cost of risk management
There's lots of talk about risk management these days. A lot of it in the voluntary sector is to do with risks to the people we support. In this post I'm talking about risks to the project. What is it that could stop your project, or slow it down, or cause it to fail in [...]
Stu’s simple planning tool
Hey, this is a busy week, so yet another post. Today’s topic is the simple planning tool. There are those projects that require the ‘big tools’, but there are some that are smaller and simpler and they don’t really need the sledgehammer approach. I’ve managed quite a few that fall into this category, and I [...]
Who is the project manager?
I was talking to a finance lady from a local charity which had just received Lottery funding for what sounded like a major project. She was trying to get her head around the 70 or so milestones required by the project, and was having some project management training. Her tale of woe was that her [...]
