How Much Time Should Be Spent Planning?
byHow long should we spend on planning as a proportion of the project lifecycle? That's a very good question, and one this practitioner often gets asked. So, is there an answer?
Top Influencers
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Upcoming Webinars
The Agile Enterprise: Managing Financial Aspects in Agile Projects
Jan 10, 2020 9:00 AM EST (UTC-5)
PREMIUM webinar
Agile is sometimes introduced as a cheaper way of delivering projects, products, and services. Unlike the traditional approach of measuring the value delivered based on the planned deliverables, the budget spent, and meeting the critical milestones, Agile doesn't and shouldn't track the delivery in the same way. Agile is a new approach, and traditional project finance management may not be relevant or can become an impediment to agility. Agile is or should be based on trust, and in an Agile organization, most of the financial planning and reporting should not be necessary. However, very few organizations have the necessary conditions to abolish tight financial management. This webinar will propose a few financial management approaches for Agile projects, highlighting the necessity as well as the challenges of each of the proposed models.
Advance Your Career
Creating and Capturing Value – More than just Cost Reduction
Clarifying and widening the status quo around value, especially at the enterprise level. This webinar aims to offer an explanation of value management that goes beyond the notion of value engineering and process-based tools.
EDM: Earned Duration Management a Novel Approach
The concept of schedule monitoring and control as one of the most important functions of project management has not been fully exploited. That could stem from the dominance of Earned Value Management Systems which use cost indicators to measure schedule preformance. This can be misleading. In contrast to Earned Value and Earned Schedule, the authors have developed the Earned Duration Management (EDM) which uses certain indices to measure progress and performance of schedule and cost.
Save Time With Tools + Templates
Project Charter for Task, Resource & Cost Estimation
PREMIUM deliverable
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This project charter includes sections for allocating phase owners and tasks; timelines; budget/resource allocation; and cost estimation. Adapt it to fit your project.
Project Resources Budgetary Analytics Tool
deliverable
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This template is designed to show projected budget costs for project human resources (a consulting team, for example) and provide a comparative analysis of actual money spent on those resources and hours used to date by those resources. It can be easily updated as desired (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.). The tool provides an immediate illustration of the state of the project at any point along the project life cycle by showing whether the money and hours utilized to date are above, at or below the projected budget amount.
Profit-Loss Template
PREMIUM deliverable
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This Excel sheet helps you track monetary trends for various project items and plots a graph summary based on your entries. Adapt the items and expenses to suit your project.
Overview of the Project Management Process
presentation
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While actively participating in mentorship during a project with a local design/build firm, this practitioner compiled an overview of the project management process as detailed in PMI’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). Use this overview with other project managers as a tool to reference in your day-to-day PM activities (as well as share with new project managers).
Learn From Others
The Earned Value Budget Square
byThe article is devoted to the underlying mathematical concepts of earned value: linear function, Cartesian coordinates and tangent. The EV visualization named “budget square” is derived from these concepts—and helps us master the earned value concept for both certification and practical needs.
How to Model Testing in a Project Plan
byWe all know the last thing you do in the project is test it. The question, however, is how to plan for it. The problem with many project plans is that they don't allow for a situation where the test fails, which is almost inevitable. Here's some help.
Topic Teasers Vol. 121: A Project Management Pricing Strategy
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Question: As a part of the new project management office in my company, I have been asked to become involved in setting a pricing strategy for the organization. That appears absolutely no place in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), and I have no idea how to begin. Am I to be planning just the cost for the people on the project team, or do I need to know about other organizational costs? Are they actually going to use my work to decide how much our customers will pay? Eek!
3 Ways to Improve Project Financial Sustainability
byAs a project manager, you’re used to focusing on the project itself. That makes sense when it comes to hitting deadlines and making your budget. There’s a gap though. You might be hurting the organization’s financial sustainability.
Staying Sustainable After Launch
byMost projects don't end with their launch date—they have an active lifespan and eventual decommissioning. Do you know what the true end-to-end cost of your project is?
Size Estimation – Some Thoughts From the Trenches
byEstimating something to be developed in a product—something that has not been done before—involves inherent uncertainty, not the least about how much work is required to produce a finished product. Estimation is about having a grip on the size of a project in terms of the amount of work, complexity or functionality, and is critical to the business.
How Much Management Reserve Do You Need?
byEffective decision-making requires forecasting the outcome of each option based on the probability of alternative scenarios. As a project manager, you must become the financial advisor on your project. Management reserve should be added to your baseline costs, then used to manage the uncertainty of risks and to mitigate variability.
Topic Teasers Vol. 114: Making Budgets Work
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Question: My team is experienced and motivated, and while we come in around the budget I have constructed, management is constantly saying it doesn’t make any money on my projects. I am figuring in salaries and costs for raw materials at a constant rate. I always show that people work the number of hours I have projected. The company executives seem to be pleased with the work of other project managers, even if they show much higher costs than I do. Where am I going wrong?
How to Do Better, Cheaper, Sooner
byAre you looking beyond individual departments and focusing on the value created in the full series of activities they perform to create and deliver their product? Here’s the story of one PM who was willing to step beyond her role to move the focus of “better, cheaper, sooner” to the whole chain of work her firm delivered to its customer.
Data Quality Management in Engineering and Construction Projects
byThe engineering and construction industry is transforming from a document-driven to a digitally driven sector. Besides the physical assets delivered, managing project data and information is essential to providing better quality deliverables, cutting costs and controlling risks.
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"Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?" - Charlie McCarthy (Edgar Bergen) |
