One of the best ways of selecting a project is by utilizing economic value added (EVA) methodology. This methodology is also considered a criterion of project acceptance. EVA requires effective collaboration between finance and project management, an alliance that not only enables the project management professionals to understand how the company's finance works, but also allows them to assist business leaders in making better financial decisions.
You're leading the team to deliver...what more do they want?! This article highlights a few, simple best practices that--if introduced at the beginning of your project--might help you easily control costs along the way.
Speaking Stakeholder seems easy at first since it's rooted in English. However, the challenge is the language can differ from project to project. Here are a few examples and key lessons learned in stakeholder communication.
How objective are your operations reviews? Applying objective metrics to your operations reviews will enable the project teams to focus on the troubled projects instead of the entire portfolio--and project managers should adopt earned value to drive project status.
Code-off-the-Shelf (COTS) based solutions are intended to be easy and inexpensive to implement but their complexity is often underestimated. The author highlights some of the lessons learned from several large scale COTS implementations in the public sector and suggests ways project managers can avoid expensive overruns and sponsor dissatisfaction.
One of the inputs earned value management (EVM) uses to obtain an indicator about the cost performance of projects is the cost incurred by the project until a certain date. Typically, such information is provided by finance departments. This paper reviews the different methods used by finance departments to calculate and measure the incurred costs in projects, and how these methods may impact the way the project manager applies the EVM to measure, control, and track the status of his or her project.
Many years after the appearance of the first project management (PMO) acronym, management professionals and executives still find it very difficult to understand what a PMO is, where the PMO exists, and to whom the PMO reports. Is it a title, a department, or a set of policies and procedures? The purpose of this white paper is to clarify the above by initiating a scale system to understand the concept. It also illustrates an example of how to define and establish a special purpose Program Management Office PgMO.
One of the most important roles of PPM is budget management, and financial management is a key skill for portfolio managers. But at the portfolio level it’s not that simple. Here we offer some thoughts on how portfolio-level budgets should be planned and managed.
Earned value can be a powerful performance measure on projects. But there are several things that need to be in place before it can ever be adopted by a PM on a single project, let alone by an organization on all of its projects.
My Book Report on the Project Management Institute® Practice Standard for Earned Value Management
Exposure Working Draft, Preface, Chapters 1 & 2
Way back when I was firmly ensconced i ...
I'm going to spend the next several posts discussing commonly held, but, in my opinion, profoundly erroneous tenets of project management. Two esteemed colleagues, David Hampton and Alice Skehan, PMP, ...
