PMcrunch

MS Project skills can be valuable!  It’s worth it to take the time and become familiar with this pervasive product that is used widely.

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In our increasingly matrixed world, the job of the project manager does not always involve having complete control of project resources – requiring some unique skills.

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Presumably as a Project Manager you see yourself, as a leader…or at least an aspiring, developing leader. But are you a “maven”?

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One of the most profound and ubiquitous management concepts over the past 30 years is “systems thinking”. Systems thinking is all around us. One example is that project management has in essence been “systematized” by the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide!

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Whenever you need to introduce a new service, which typically is intended to take the form of a process, you need to create a project. This is much like building a bridge, setting up a new bank brankch, or implementing an IT project. There is an idea for a project end state, and the project is getting to that end state. All of this is particularly applicable to IT projects.

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Managing becomes so much easier when you build a foundation for what you are managing. In essence, this means getting intimate with the requirements, as well as the needs of the stakeholders. Stakeholder management and familiarity with requirements rank about as high as it gets as determinants of project success. The reason is simple: they form the basis upon which everything else is built. Building a strong foundation in these areas makes it easy to take any next steps toward managing the project.

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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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In the hassle and buzzle of day to day work life, of course mixed with a busy personal life, we need to remember that our team members also have their own personal goals, aspirations and challenges. There are many things we can do related to this but the first step is always awareness. Here are [...]

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As project and program managers we need to make sure that our projects are moving forward. We need to make sure that we identify the obstacles that get in the way of progress and that we address and remove them. We need to make sure that the greater project team has the tools and resources [...]

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Oftentimes, as[tag-dir]project managers[/tag-dir] and leaders, we are called upon to compare a variety of potential solutions and to either recommend or choose the best one for our situation. There are a variety of ways to do this. It is important for us to recognize that the answer we come up with is very closely related to the questions we ask and how we do the comparison. Many times—perhaps even most of the time—we do this comparisons in a relatively informal way, putting together our own structure. In other cases however, there is a much formalized organizational structure with a formal name such as [/tag-tec]“analysis of alternatives”[tag-dir] that is performed.

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