Research and development has more pressure to deliver than any other business function. Using the consumer durable product industry as a base, this article will elaborate on four key challenges that R&D projects face—along with countermeasures that an R&D project manager can take.
Project management, business analysis and organizational change management are all areas where we can grow our professional careers. How should you proceed? What course of action will yield fast results and yet lay the foundation for a strong and sustainable career?
Question: My latest project is to work with a small team to see if we need to add predictive analytics to our already brimming list of desktop applications. Frankly, I don’t see that we use even half of the features that we have now, but maybe some departments find value in them. To be honest, not being a math person, I don’t really understand why finding that we are 20% higher or 32% lower on some random statistic would do anything to help the business. The oddity is there! That doesn’t change anything for next month or week. What am I missing?
Within tier 1, construction projects’ values are usually in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Based on experiences in the tier 1 environment, this is the first in a series of articles describing basic tier 1 requirements and the project manager’s responsibilities running a live construction project. The articles are particularly intended to provide real examples to young, up-and-coming hopefuls to the project manager role.
For complex programs to achieve their strategic goals, it is not only important to decompose their scope into controllable constituents, but also to stitch the pieces back again into a cohesive whole. Scope decomposition techniques—systems thinking, WBS, and progressive elaboration—help to effectively manage programs so that they meet their stated objectives.
A solid business case is one of the fundamental building blocks of project management. The goals and objectives of any given project, at a high level, are simple—we must be good stewards of our limited resources to ensure long-term competitive edge for the business. This article provides a seven-step process to help.
The need for prioritization appears when multiple projects are planned in an organization and there is a shortage of resources. In order to deliver business goals and objectives, the focus should be on projects that provide strategic value. Learn about the factors and methods involved to better prioritize your projects.
The webinar PMI-PBA®: From "What It Is?" to "I Did It!" was full of valuable information, and the conversation continued afterward! Here, the presenter covers some additional questions and answers that came out of her presentation.
Question: I seem like I am constantly facing problems that have no easy or ideal solutions. Since I work in an environment with only myself as a project manager, I have no colleagues I can ask for advice. How can I stop second-guessing myself regarding whether or not I am making good decisions for how to move forward in bad situations?
Question: I am more in the manufacturing or fabrication part of project management, but often my teams and I are working with an IT team to create a hybrid product. It’s not that I need to do their work, it’s just that sometimes I feel stupid when I talk to the other team because I don’t understand some of the terms they are using. Or, once they explain them to me…I knew that idea all along, but I had heard it called by another name. How can I get a quick glimpse of what new ideas I need to know and what they are called without spending too much of my already overbooked day researching what to even learn?