Category: Project Management Advice
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5 Tips to Become a Successful Project Manager
Project management is a role that requires a diverse set of capabilities and skills, backed up by knowledge and experience. To deliver a project on time, within budget, and to a high standard, you will need to possess skills across a range of disciplines including time and budget management, team leadership, client relations and prioritisation…
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What You Need To Know About Planning A Project
Perhaps the first thing to note about project management and planning a project, in particular, is that projects never stick to the plan. Change always happens and provided you accept that, then it is really just a matter of altering the plan in a way that will allow the project to still deliver a successful…
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Is This Project A Success Or Not?
What happens when a project has been completed to schedule and more or less on-budget but the client is reluctant to sign-off the work and even more reluctant to pay for it? The final product meets the documented requirements so surely a project that is on-time, on-budget and on-scope must be a success. Aren’t those…
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The Consistent Project Manager
As Christmas once again approaches, I have been mulling over the importance of consistency in projects (maybe I’ve just had too much mulled wine). This whole issue of consistency in projects is intriguing because great success may be achieved by the opposite of a consistent, reliable project manager. For instance, a brave and daring…
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Breaking Down Project Management: How PMBOK Helps The Project Management Student
Many organizations and companies hire project managers to take charge of extensive contracts. They are not the contractors or professionals involved in doing the work, but they understand the essential elements of leadership and organization which are required to make a job involving many smaller jobs and lots of employees run smoothly. During the completion…
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The Disadvantages of using Spreadsheets to Manage Projects
While projects can be managed effectively with spreadsheets if the project is small, simple and has well-defined boundaries there are disadvantages to using spreadsheets because they do not offer a range of capabilities and controls that are likely to be required for larger and more complex projects. They can, of course, effectively assist in managing…
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The Extra Ingredients for Project Management Success
I have been thinking about what might just be the main ingredients of a successful project. But just like you can follow a cake recipe but the cake doesn’t turn out to be quite as good as you expected (or at least mine don’t) so you can follow the rules and methodologies of good project…
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Controlling the 3 Project Management Constraints
The key to delivering a project that a client is truly satisfied with comes down to 3 constraints: Budget, Schedule and Scope Not all of these constraints may be within the control of the project manager, for example, there may be a pre-defined schedule designed to meet some inflexible market-driven deadline. But providing the project…
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Ways to Improve Your Project Management Skills
Successful Project Managers often have soft skills that set them apart from their colleagues and help them to deliver projects successfully where other equally well-qualified project managers would fail. Of course, you can’t be a successful project manager with only the right personality traits – you also need the right training and experience but combining…
