PMcrunch

What is Project Leadership all about? What constitutes leadership, and how can we measure it? Why is it important to us? These are some questions that arise for me when I think about what I call the “Menund’r'm Conundrum”.

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Depending on your environment, you may have some team members that seem like non-contributors, and in some ways actually get in the way. While I have never experienced this – or at least not for long – on the smaller more critical projects I have managed, I do see this on larger more matrix-oriented projects. The question is, “How can I handle this?”

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Human resources is an important function in all organizations and that includes the project organization. In these difficult economic times, the human resources’ function is being tested in organizations worldwide. How does that testing in this environment translate into the project team environment?

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Oftentimes, less experienced project managers and project teams wallow in uncertainty and lack of direction due to the lack of proper project management documentation. I have seen situations where there are lots of desperate sources of documentation but the specific project at hand is not well enough to find.

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Managing large projects and programs is challenging and most agree that one of the best approaches is to break large projects and programs down into smaller readily manageable projects.

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Project cutbacks are a common theme. In many cases, teams are simply reduced in size. In addition, project scopes are decreased while agile methods are a key way organizations develop software more efficiently. The term agility goes far beyond that.

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Frequently, in our projects, especially those of technical nature, we are confronted with the opportunity to analyze various possible solutions. In this process, it is critically important to understand all aspects of cost related to each alternative. A potential trap is to simply compare price. Oftentimes, price is only one very small aspect of the cost of going with a particular product or service.

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These tough times are different from past recessions in that “visibility is low”. What I mean by that is that it is not just a matter of seeing that sales had declined a certain amount, or that certain costs had reached a certain amount; it is not just that there is a general slimming or pruning of weaker competitors across the board. The problem is that it is very hard to predict with any reasonable level of certainty what is going to happen next and, thus, we find ourselves driving through our challenges “with low visibility”.

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On so many projects we assemble all the tasks and then assign them to the appropriate individuals. However, I have found that as an alternative we need to consider assigning some tasks to a small team of people. This may sound inefficient but I think it is essential, especially in certain environments and on certain types of tasks.

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SaaS, an acronym for Software as a Service, continues to evolve in the market today. Any project or program manager involved with software application implementation needs to be very familiar with SaaS. But any project manager on any project where there are systems involved with managing any aspect of the project will also benefit by being familiar with SaaS.

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