All projects should be run properly with due regard for objectives, deadlines, budgets – all that good stuff. Some projects are big and complicated and need detailed plans to make sure they work. Then there are some smaller projects which don’t need the big tools, and to use those big tools would be serious overkill. [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Resources category.
Stuart’s Friday tip
Here’s a little known fact about Powerpoint. There comes a time in any presentation when you want the audience to stop looking at the screen and look at something else. That screen is hypnotic and no matter how exciting the other thing is, their eyes will be drawn towards your slide. It’s as if there’s [...]
Why cashflow forecasts are so important
… and how to put a cashflow forecast together There are many articles about putting budgets together. This one is a little different. In this article I assume you have worked out the budget for your scheme, and I want to take you a stage further and emphasis the importance of putting together a cashflow [...]
Checklists – why re-invent the wheel?
A question from a delegate at a recent project management course prompted a discussion about checklists. If you're doing something you've never done before (for example, organising a rally in London) what things do you need to think about? It's so easy to miss something, and then your event turns into a disaster. We all [...]
Avoiding distraction
You know how it is. You're trying to concentrate on a particularly difficult/important topic and people keep interrupting you. All you need is 20 minutes peace and quiet, but you can't get it. Perhaps you have the luxury of an office door to close. Maybe people ignore it and knock anyway. Perhaps you could go [...]
Some really useful free stuff
As charities make that transition from a couple of people in a front room to an organisation with staff and/or volunteers you need to get more organised. That phrase puts the tremblers on lots of people, but it needn't. You can struggle to find databases to hold your staff information, or try to share documents [...]
Evernote
There are some good tools around, and I found a cracker the other day – it’s Evernote. I probably use about 10% of its capability but even that has prompted me to blog about it. It’s a free piece of software that bolts on to your web browser. You can save web pages with a [...]
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 [...]
Could be useful …
It's not all fun running a voluntary organisation. There's some stuff that just has to be done, which takes time and detracts from the reasons we're here. On this page, you'll find some spreadsheets that I initially set up for one particular organisation and then made them generic. There's one that's a holiday chart [...]
