Statement of Work
Back to Basics: How to Start a Project?
Aristotle was a great philosopher, but it’s my belief that if he had lived today, he would have become a great project manager. Living in 4th century B.C., Aristotle wrote a series of books on politic...
Who’s in Charge: Obtaining Third Party Services and What Questions to Ask for Success
In my early years as a project manager (PM) for IBM, I worked on several assignments where third party vendor or sub-contractors (usually with a specialized skill to perform) were brought in to work o...
How to Create a Successful Procurement Management Plan
Having a detailed procurement management plan in place is essential to the overall success of a project. As well as enabling you to identify and document how the project will conduct its procurements,...
Outsourcing Done Wrong
Some of the Worst Practices that Guarantee your Time and Money Won’t Be Well Spent An outsourcing project, especially in Information Technology (IT), can be a long and winding road studded with sweet ...
Taking the PMP® Exam? A Sample Question
Question Your company has just been awarded the contract for a research project. The CEO of your company has asked you, as the project manager, to create the project charter and send it to her so that...
Successfully Managing a Waterfall Project with Individual Work by Agile Teams.
As we all know, there are two general approaches or methodologies used for projects: Waterfall and Agile. Before I continue with an explanation of the differences between those two, let me emphasize o...
Getting Earned Value Metrics from Microsoft Project
You may snicker to think that Microsoft Project can serve as a tool for producing earned value metrics. After all, there are highly complex, dedicated products that perform this job. In this article I...
Boost Project Planning with Your Big, Monster Piece of Paper
To enhance project planning, my company established a process called the “Big Monster Piece of Paper” or BMPP for short. The BMPP method is a structured, top-down brainstorming approach to...
A Project Engagement That Went Horribly Wrong
An organization had asked us to undertake a Project Server deployment initiative. The user base was gigantic. The deployment timeframe was tight, and on the agreed-upon budget we could just scrape by....
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