Process > Management Buy-in

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning are no longer optional. Protecting infrastructure and information assets of an organization is one of management's primary duties. Here are some ideas and options for making sure you don't fall down on the job.

If your project seems overbooked, with dueling stakeholders and mixed directions, getting everyone on board can make all the difference. Involvement of all parties in a project keeps things rolling, but being a project loner can mean a lonely ride.

Here are five challenges often encountered during earned value management implementations, and the steps that your organization should take to avoid or overcome them.

We're all actors on a project stage...and a well-written planning document sets us up for a successful project. Here, we explore the key elements of this all-important effort.

What does your project management office need to do to ensure that it's serving your organization? What makes it effective? In this writer's professional experience, five primary factors greatly influence the ultimate success of the PMO.

Last month we looked at how agile methods provide multiple opportunities for embracing proactive risk management. This month’s article extends risk management beyond the project manager role and introduces the benefits of making it more of a collaborative team exercise.

If your team members had the opportunity to tell you what they really think, what would they say? In this open letter to project managers, you'll learn what is going on in the minds of your workers and find out what really matters.

Just laid off, or missing that passion and desire with your job? Consider starting a microbusiness. If you're careful and frugal, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a project management or IT consulting firm, a consumer electronics website or even a beauty products company.

Many risk management guides describe a mitigation strategy that allocates funding and schedule margin for when a risk “comes true.” A better approach is to “buy down” the risk before it turns into an issue. Here is an example based on the U.S. Department of Defense’s approach.

There are 10 key points to keep in mind when auditing a software development project.

A major project could have been a big jolt to her career, but Kyla Watt felt less than empowered by her Low Energy gig. Sparks fly and projects fizzle out when both the client and the consulting group are totally out of control sometimes you have to know when to pull the plug.

When considering a risk management tool, a number of factors should be considered, from cost to functionality to customization. Here is some guidance on choosing the right risk tool for your needs.

You shouldn't have to beg to get management buy-in. Selling project management to senior management can be simple if you use the building blocks to create an effective business case.

They all have obvious and obscure possibilities. Just make sure you don’t forget these five things that don’t get enough detail in schedules.

To achieve business leadership, we need to have competitive advantage direction from people dedicated to the principles of cost leadership. While it may not get quite the hype that cost reduction efforts do at an organization, it has the potential to meet crucial company goals.

From cross-functional to cross-dysfunctional, a big part of project management is working to grow a high-performing team and then caring for it. Agile concepts around empowered teams and team decision-making support these goals, so there should be no surprise that agile PM aligns well with team development best practices.

Discussion on quality management has not evolved much since the mid-1990s. Within executive circles, the discussions are not about the importance of quality, but rather on what quality is, how it is achieved and how it can be measured. The issues surrounding quality seem focused on definition and approach rather than on need. What is quality? What does senior management expect from the quality process, and how do these expectations apply to IT? Read on...

We've already looked at the opportunities agile methods offer for proactive risk management and examined the benefits of engaging the whole team in risk management through collaborative games. As our agile risk management series continues, we walk through those games and explains how to engage a team in the first three of the six risk management steps.

Changing an iconic product can be perilous. Think New Coke. But sometimes change is necessary. From assessing the business case to implementation, here is a look at how a manufacturing giant used a fundamental project management approach to minimize risk when it sought to modify its most popular products.

For anyone thinking about or faced with implementing a PPM tool, here are some tips to keep in mind to help you wade through the sometimes problematic process.

So who are you and what is it you do? Perhaps the single biggest problem facing the project management profession is that many practitioners can’t agree on what exactly they do, how they should do it, or how to get better at it. Here are some observations based on an ongoing online discussion that has drawn in more than 600 project managers.

There is lots of great information available on how to use agile methods for custom software development projects, but less so for package implementations. Commercial-Off-The-Shelf solutions make up a large percentage of the IT projects undertaken by companies each year, and many organizations are missing out on benefits that an agile package approach can bring.

Few project leaders want to spend the up-front time and money to actually put together a risk management plan, but it truly needs to be your first step in effectively managing risks on your project. Your planning needs to include four steps in order to be effective and in order to be a "sellable" tool in your PM process.

Customers are acting with considerably more caution these days as we see how difficult economic times are putting pressure on them to be more particular about who they choose to do business with. What you don’t want to do is push your customers away...so keep these thoughts in mind.

You know that using Scrum to manage projects can make a positive difference in your organization, but the executives you need to help drive the change are lukewarm or resistant to the idea. Here are some tips for getting them to buy into and support a Scrum implementation.

You can post information 'til you're blue in the face, but how do you get people to use it?

Those with solid agile project management experience and knowledge--coupled with an entrepreneurial vision to see the trends and navigate incubating startups to launch--are poised to take great advantage both monetarily and professionally in years to come.

Lack of face-to-face time makes cohesion difficult to achieve on distributed teams. Collaboration software can help, with forums for information exchange that enhance productivity and accountability. Along the way, it should also make “getting things done” more rewarding and spontaneous. Here are four keys to keeping your virtual team connected.

ITIL, OPM3, XP, APM, PMBOK, PRINCE2 — the list goes on and on. How does anyone make sense of all the management mantras? The reality is that most do not. True leaders understand the importance of getting every member of the team to take ownership of their actions and the overall strategy. This requires more than an alphabet soup of process, it requires an owned strategy.

As you promise to drop 20 pounds, exercise three days a week and obtain a better work/life balance, don’t forget to add a few project management best practices to your resolutions.

A veteran Belgium-based project manager and current learning specialist at IBM shares his experiences on major projects in China and France, as well as the challenges of securing executive buy-in and working with different cultures.

Cross-project integration, executive buy-in and clearly communicated benefits continue to challenge PMOs. Adding traditional business measurement benchmarks such as mission alignment, domain authority and organizational readiness are needed to help project leaders deliver and report success quicker.

Sink or swim! Taking over a dysfunctional project team can be a very frustrating yet exhilarating experience. This article summarizes some “rules of the road” that should help you navigate through shark-infested waters--with the result being a highly motivated department or team delivering quality projects on time.

Driving from point A to point B might require a map, but driving customers to your business requires much more. Creating and sustaining successful CRM solutions requires commitment from your entire organization and a single, clearly defined implementation roadmap.