PMcrunch

Often it is hard to decide to what to do first, or what to do next. In fact, in my experience, it is often easier to make such decisions on large projects than smaller projects. The Theory of Constraints is a neat concept that can help.

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Earning your PMP certification can help you to better ‘lead the charge’. And, conversely, learning to ‘lead the charge’ will definitely help you to become a more effective project manager – whether you are a PMP, CAPM, or neither. But what comes first, the chicken or the egg?

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Taxonomy refers to the categorization or breakdown to more clearly defined entities that can make an overall grouping of knowledge more understandable while there are many precise definitions for taxonomy, this should suffice for this particular discussion. The question is what taxonomy means to the project manager.

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Project managers got to be project managers from a variety of career paths. Many of us have become specialists in certain areas, such as earned value, or scheduling, or critical path methods, or other such specialized techniques within the project management skill set. However, many others of us got here because it represented an opportunity to actually broaden skill sets and qualify us for other positions.

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Critical Chain project management is a great idea, or really a great collection of ideas. It has similarities to the Critical Path Method in that it focuses on the critical path tasks for managing the project. But there are several innovative ideas that distinguish critical chain from critical path, and some unique hurdles to implementation.

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Parkinson’s Law – the concept that work expands to meet the time available – is a common human behavioral reality. To deal with it, we can always tighten up the timeframe or define the work and deliverables more explicitly, but it is not always so straightforward to deal with.

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The earned values formulas can be confusing to those studying for their PMP or CAPM exams. To assist in remembering the formulas for CV, SV, CPI and SPI, just remember three simple rules.

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In a world where there is so much happening, so much coming at us, one big question is: “Should I complete the project I am working on before taking on a new one?” Well, the answer is undoubtedly different for each person and in each situation. But the considerations are similar.

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I recently read a forum entry where someone was looking for advice on PM tools and PM software used across the globe for IT needs. The person mentioned that their company had some general tools like Critical Path, PERT etc., and various models for Estimation. The question was “What would be best software to support all these tools + models and standards like CMMI or ITIL, then support for SEI – indicator template for measurement analysis, Risk Management alerting + Alerting on Change management etc. Also requested were opinions on using lines of code as a metric.

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