The project management office (PMO) often emerges as a construct to manage the project portfolio as a company’s project management maturity increases. The PMO may sit at different levels in the organization and provide a variety of functions to a program, organization, or enterprise. Before organizations implement a PMO, they should understand the different...
A typical team status meeting includes the project manager reviewing the work plan and asking team members to report on relevant task progress in the work plan. A typical response from team members is “The task is 90 percent complete,” or some variable percent. Project managers can make the mistake of...
A PMO handbook is helpful for organizations seeking a standard set of steps to support project management processes. It can also quickly orient new project managers to the organization’s project management expectations and help align activities to standardized processes and tools. Here’s an example to get you started. How do...
In this Microsoft Project Tutorial, you’ll learn how to use a custom filter to find late tasks in Microsoft Project. When managing a project schedule of even a moderate size, it’s valuable to quickly identify late tasks without scrolling through a large hierarchy of tasks. In Microsoft Project, you can...
Does anyone struggle with email overload, management, and the quest for “inbox zero”? Is anyone willing to admit they’ve got a few hundred unread emails in their inbox? Even worse, does anyone have a few thousand READ email messages that eat up your mailbox storage? Email overload is an affliction...
Are you considering joining the PMO Career path? Not all project management offices are created equal, and the perception of a PMO’s value significantly influences a project manager’s decision to pursue a position. Here are five concerns that could discourage a project manager from seeking a PMO-related role and why...
Meeting minutes are necessary overhead when running an effective meeting. The need to organize a formal agenda, track action items, make decisions, and distribute minutes increases with the meeting’s importance. Managing meeting minutes still creates administrative hassles, such as tracking action items from meeting to meeting or easily retaining or...
To apply earned value to your Microsoft Project plan, you will need to complete the following six tasks: Step 1. Enter Resources in the Resource Sheet View The resource sheet view allows project managers to define the different resources available to a project. MS-Project tracks work resources and material resources....
In this Atlassian Confluence tutorial, you’ll discover multiple methods to leverage Atlassian Confluence for effective project management. We’ll guide you through creating project dashboards that provide an at-a-glance view of project health, roadmap planning to outline your project’s future trajectory, and status reports for regular updates on progress. Confluence becomes...
A fellow Tactical PM reader asked me how to best prepare for the PMP certification exam. I passed my PMP certification in 2001, and the types of training material have changed over the past 23 years. My PMP Exam Prep would remain the same, but the format and training choices...
In this Confluence tutorial, I’ll show you how to create an automatic action item list based on all the projects in a given program. Confluence is a powerful collaboration tool I’ve used to track action items and meeting minutes across various projects and programs. In my last article, I showed...
Have you ever struggled to support a newly deployed application while managing subsequent releases? Have you ever had problems with project transition to operations? Enterprise projects and programs often have multiple releases to various countries and business units. Project teams risk becoming lost in transition when the initial release is...
Project plans, timelines, and Gantt charts are just a few of the many tracking and planning records the project management team needs to oversee a project successfully. But imagine if you have to create these documents—and many others—from scratch. What a dull way to waste time, huh? Every project manager...
You may have heard the term network sensitivity if you’ve been studying critical path methodology (CPM) and project schedule development. Without going into a lecture on constructing project networks with forward and backward passes, I’ll define sensitivity in simple terms. A project schedule is considered sensitive if the critical path...
The best way to determine whether your project is feasible is to complete a Feasibility Study. This process helps you gain confidence that the solution you need to build can be implemented on time and under budget. So here’s how to do it in 5 simple steps. Completing a Feasibility...
If you’ve worked with external vendors at any time, I’m sure you’ve noticed the variety of formats vendors use for a project schedule. In some cases, it is a formal MS Project schedule. In other cases, it is a set of dates described in an email or developed in every...
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