George LewisProgram/Project Manager| DXC Technology CompanyHeredia, Costa Rica
Often we come across useful ways of doing things, but we do not generate a template for it. If we do this, the next time we face the same issue, the solution becomes more natural.
We get caught up in our day to day activities and repeat the work over and over again. Saving Changes...
Sort By:
Vivek BhatiaPrincipal| The Bhatia GroupOakland, Ca, United States
Heh, I actually got so annoyed at having to regularly re-invent templates for new clients despite them having prior multiple consulting companies working for them that I'm taking a multi-month break to write up a full methodology & templates that all align with each other. And, I'll be publishing them for free in PDF form with just a Creative Commons trademark (so other consulting companies don't just re-sell the full kit).
Time & time again I walk into a situation and realize they are only doing 65% of the things required for success, and it's relatively simple to close that gap. And consulting companies will only give you everything if you hire them. If you skip 35% of the ingredients on a recipe, it's going to taste bad. And if the only option is to hire a professional cook, you'll never want to make that dish again.
Our value isn't in creating the templates, it's in having a complete toolkit of templates that work together, and knowing how to facilitate the teams that accomplish the tasks. Hopefully some day companies won't hoard these things, require email signups, annual memberships. But today is not that day.
...
1 reply by Bob Thomas
Aug 07, 2018 9:54 AM
Bob Thomas
...
That's quite a gift to the PM community! Please let us know when you post your docs.
I've kept every template I've created so that I wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel.
Saving Changes...
VASUDEV NARAYANANProgram Manager| Pentapolis FoundationChennai, Tamil Nadu, India
This is where the PMO can be of help for the organization, for the project team, and for the individual at large. The common guidelines and practices that are followed by the organization can be derived based on the model adapted by the organization. Thus baselining the documents per phase for the lifecycle can be of great help for the Project Manager. When there is a need for a change in the templates, the project manager by approaching the PMO can provide necessary feedback or the requirement that can cascade the changes into the further release. No harm in creating your own project management templates, but you need a police to police your work. Saving Changes...
Drew CraigSr. Agile & Product Coach| VanguardPhiladelphia, Pa, United States
Create a template, or simply use what was created, blow out the data, save as your new template. No reason to recreate every time. Quality over quantity, efficiency over busy-work. Reward yourself with reuse, and possibly improve the efficiency of your peers by standardizing a process for the entire PMO. Saving Changes...
Vasudev is correct - for practitioners who don't usually enjoy downtime between projects, there may be no time to curate & scrub useful content we've created during our last project. A PMO can support knowledge creation by taking the archives of a project and distilling reusable collateral.
In the absence of this, a good PM will at least maintain a repository of populated artifacts which they feel can serve as a good starting point for future work.
Kiron Saving Changes...
Dinah YoungProject Manager / Software Asset Manager| Prince William CountySpringfield, Va, United States
Over the years I have updated templates, found templates on other sites (like this one) or created a template. If we did not have a template or the one we were using was incomplete, I did whatever I needed to get a good template in place. And I maintained a repository of all my team's artifacts and tried to gather other team's artifacts. This was before we had much structure at my job. Now that we are setting up a PMO and I am on it, I can focus more on getting the best template for all to use, making sure all use it and definitely have control over the repository of artifacts. Saving Changes...
Heh, I actually got so annoyed at having to regularly re-invent templates for new clients despite them having prior multiple consulting companies working for them that I'm taking a multi-month break to write up a full methodology & templates that all align with each other. And, I'll be publishing them for free in PDF form with just a Creative Commons trademark (so other consulting companies don't just re-sell the full kit).
Time & time again I walk into a situation and realize they are only doing 65% of the things required for success, and it's relatively simple to close that gap. And consulting companies will only give you everything if you hire them. If you skip 35% of the ingredients on a recipe, it's going to taste bad. And if the only option is to hire a professional cook, you'll never want to make that dish again.
Our value isn't in creating the templates, it's in having a complete toolkit of templates that work together, and knowing how to facilitate the teams that accomplish the tasks. Hopefully some day companies won't hoard these things, require email signups, annual memberships. But today is not that day.
That's quite a gift to the PM community! Please let us know when you post your docs.
I've kept every template I've created so that I wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel. Saving Changes...
Any PM should have some template from past project and use downtime to improve on them.
An organization should maximize downtime of the PMs using their experience to suggest improvement on corporate templates. Saving Changes...
Christian NelsonTeam Lead| TaaffeNelson & AssociatesClogherhead, County Louth, Ireland
The advances of the digital age enable maintenance of a historical archive of work that provides organization, and a window into successes and failures of the past. Lessons learned from past projects are harder to forget when a quick word search of the archive can be done. At the outset of any new project I have team members review the historical archive for lessons learned, recommendations made, etc. It helps save time as the project moves forward. I also encourage team members to gather as much as possible, store it for later review and inclusion in the archive after vetting it (necessary to keep archive from becoming a trash bin). Saving Changes...
