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Project Management Quotes

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:11:08 +0100

Project management articles are full of snappy quotes. It's hard to read more than a few pages of a magazine before running into a neat saying such as this one: "The problem with experience is that you get the test before the lesson." - Anon. Dutch process engineer...

Real Time Planning

Fri, 9 Jul 2010 15:52:17 +0100

Real time planning has the potential to change how we run projects by making it much easier to discover problems early. It will also make life harder for project managers by making it more complicated to work out what's really a problem and what's just noise...

A disaster recovery toolkit

Thu, 1 Jul 2010 11:17:06 +0100

This week I am talking at the APM about a toolkit for recovering project disasters...

PERT planning

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:29:11 +0100

PERT analysis is one of the most powerful techniques available when planning a project. It can give you a much clearer view of potential problems with your schedule than a Gantt chart can...

Free web based project planning software

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:07:57 +0100

We launched the public beta of our web based planning software on Friday, after nine months of hard work through development and the closed beta. We would like to say thank you to everyone who has given us feedback so far, and we hope that you will carry on giving us new suggestions for improvements that you would like to see...

You can't copy good project managers

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:15:00 +0100

This week a fellow project manager assured me that agile was dead, and I should switch back to waterfall project management. I'll put my own opinions on the subject of agile aside for the moment because I found his reason to switch to be significant...

Technical Project Managers; good for teams, bad for projects

Tue, 1 Jun 2010 14:29:06 +0100

My job has involved a lot of programming over the last six months. I was trained as a systems engineer before working as a project manager so writing code is not totally new to me, but this is the first time I have done daily work in a structured environment on a large code base...

What gets blogged?

Tue, 25 May 2010 11:09:06 +0100

The PMI splits project management up into five process groups and nine project management areas. That makes forty five categories of project management knowledge; but do project management bloggers talk about all of them? Or do they just focus on a few important areas?

Why your project documents are wrong

Wed, 19 May 2010 15:13:58 +0100

Imagine you are writing project management process documentation. It's going to be distributed to the engineering team who will have to read it and act on the contents. What's the most important thing in the documentation?

Hopeless projects

Wed, 12 May 2010 16:21:51 +0100

Dogged by bad luck and cursed by failure in everything they try some projects just seem to be impossible. The most notable example of this I have seen was a major systems integration project. The project launch was incredible; the wine-soaked press responded well and the CEO was able to get a lot of media attention as he announced that within nine months a ground breaking new product would be available...

Re-inventing the wheel

Tue, 4 May 2010 16:30:52 +0100

Perfectionists are fond of saying "If no one had ever reinvented the wheel then you would still have stone tires fitted to your Audi." A stone-wheeled Audi is certainly a good metaphor for many projects, born of an unholy mix of scope creep and cost cutting, but this quote is probably more relevant to portfolio management than project management...

The Problem With Process

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:36:27 +0100

I was recently asked how hard it would be to set up a Wiki as an alternative to e-mail for a small project team. My answer was "nearly impossible". While it is simple to get a Wiki up and running, it is very hard to get people to use it in preference to e-mail...

How do you measure done?

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:05:54 +0100

We often hear about the project tasks that "the first 95% takes 95% of the time, and the last 5% takes 95% of the time." Mostly this quote gets dragged out during estimating sessions and is used to justify adding a nice slug of contingency to the project budget...

Reputation Widgets

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 11:10:17 +0100

Create your own #PMOT reputation score widget and add it to your blog.

The upside of outsourcing disasters

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:04:52 +0100

When working as a project recovery specialist I often see outsourced projects that have run into problems. Often a product has been delivered that mostly meets the initial specification on the surface, but internally is a mess...

Is the iPhone a banana?

Fri, 9 Apr 2010 09:49:40 +0100

There has been a lot of news recently about the change in the Apple SDK terms which appears to ban the creation of iPhone applications using technologies from competitors such as Flash from Adobe. Apple has often been accused of abusing its monopoly power by running the iPhone App Store in an anticompetitive fashion...

Project Managers on Twitter

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:44:29 +0000

Today I released an update for our Project Managers on Twitter reputation tracker. Because no project management tool is complete without a Red-Amber-Green chart we now show the RAG status of trends over the last day as well as the current standings...

Milestone Slip Charts

Mon, 8 Mar 2010 19:56:09 +0000

Milestone slip charts are designed to give an at-a-glance overview of how your project is doing. They do this by plotting the predicted delivery date for each milestone at every project status report. These charts are ideal for importing into project dashboards because, as we will see, they show history very well. They are also known as Milestone Tracking Charts...

Gantt charts

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:18:48 +0000

The number one requested feature for The Plan Is so far is the ability to display schedules as Gantt charts. A preview of this feature is now being slowly turned on for users - including the ability to set dates by drag and drop and a few other nice things...

Late Stage Investment

Thu, 4 Feb 2010 07:52:02 +0000

I spent some time yesterday talking to an independently wealthy individual who has recently made a late stage investment into a technology company and discussing the factors that had lead to his decision to go ahead. It was enlightening to actually talk to someone who operates on the investment side and see the things he was looking for and how they matched up to the advice given to companies seeking investment. I asked his permission to share the observations I got from the conversation as I thought they would also be interesting to you...

Fixed Date February

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 08:19:30 +0000

Elizabeth Harrin is running a Fixed Date February event over at the pm4girls blog. She is going to be looking at how to deal with projects that have a firm deadline; and as that is exactly the kind of thing The Plan Is was designed for I have donated some beta accounts (including some premium accounts) for her to give away...

Side Projects

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:38:12 +0000

To help keep an eye out for mentions of The Plan Is on Twitter I built a tool to export searches as an Excel spreadsheet. After a little bit more work I'm able to make it available to everyone as a web service. You can try it here: Export from Twitter to Excel.

Disaster recovery projects

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:11:49 +0000

A disaster recovery project is one with a tight deadline and fixed deliverables. If it looks like there is no way for the project to succeed - then congratulations, you have a disaster on your hands...

Crowd Computing

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:39:33 +0000

I have open sourced the code for Really Cloudy, a JavaScript library that lets you process data on your website visitors' computers...

More change

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 19:11:31 +0000

Leaving a job and starting a company is a pretty big change, but I think I can do better. I have been invited to speak at an event in the US so I'm going to make the most of it by spending three months out there...

Finding programmers for your startup

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:07:12 +0000

Because I am starting a company I read a lot of entrepreneurial mailing lists. Sometimes the emails are quite funny, especially when a 'business guy' sends a message to the list asking for programmers to join his start up...

What do I try first?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:44:35 +0000

One of the interesting things about starting up a company is the huge amount of advice on offer. Family, friends, customers and everyone on the Internet has a theory about every aspect of your operations. It's certain that at least some of the advice is good, especially when it's being offered by someone who has used that method successfully in the past. What's also certain is that a one person company cannot can implement all of it...

Reputation tracking

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:02:59 +0000

Last week I wrote a little Twitter application to track tweets with the #pmot hash tag and provide a reputation list of those who had the most influence...

Making EVM more useful for small teams

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:49:14 +0000

One of the problems with Earned Value Management is that it needs some adjustment to make it useful for smaller teams. These teams are facing a different sort of challenge than large companies, and need to adapt their project management tools to match...

Avoiding the waterfall

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:55:38 +0000

This week I have a guest post over at Kelly Waters' Agile Software Development Made Easy blog on avoiding the return of waterfall development after agile has been implemented in your organisation. You can read it here.

Minor release

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:23:48 +0000

A new release just went live that fixes a number of minor bugs with the way dates are calculated. As a result you should now find that adding and removing tasks is much more reliable. There are also a couple of corrections to the Microsoft Project exporter...

Waterfall is the future

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 09:45:32 +0000

I was speaking this weekend about Waterfall Project Management and why your project is probably a waterfall project, even if you think that it isn't. You can grab the slides and a transcript at http://theplanis.com/slides/waterfall_slides.pdf

Service outage this morning

Tue, 3 Nov 2009 08:02:27 +0000

I apologise for the unplanned service outage this morning between 6:30 and 7:30am GMT. The root cause was a power outage at Slicehost's DFW data centre. This lasted for about 30 minutes. One of our services failed to automatically restart after the outage, which caused the website to remain unavailable until a manual recovery was carried out. As a result of this incident the system recovery service is being fixed and retested to reduce the impact should this occur again. A long term plan is in place to remove our reliance on one data centre, so in the future we will be able to go through an event like this without loss of service. This work is planned for the second phase of the beta in Q1 2010. Individual customers who would like a reliability guarantee before this date are welcome to contact me to discuss how that could be achieved for them. Customer data was not at risk in this particular incident, however a clean back up was made at 6am.

An Introduction To Earned Value Management

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 17:40:23 +0000

EVM, or earned value management, is a method for viewing how well you are performing against your estimates. Unfortunately it gets very little respect because everyone insists on making it more complicated than it needs to be. I have used a cut down version of EVM to demonstrate performance over time to great effect on several projects, which is very valuable for both reporting and control...

Which milestones have to be on your start-up plan?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:13:14 +0100

This week I have a guest post over at Pawel Brodzinski's Software Project Management blog on picking milestones for small start up companies. You can read it here.

New Features

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:36:55 +0100

I have just tested and released a few new things into the beta client. Now you can name and rename your plans, share your plan with other people by sending them a short link and turn on and off public sharing. You can also view and edit plans in Safari and Internet Explorer 8 as well as Firefox. Phew! Back to work on the next batch of stuff. As always your feedback on the features you have and the features you want will be extremely welcome.

New contracts, old problems

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:57:37 +0100

I still occasionally get asked why a company needs project managers. It's a better question than many people realise as a lot of your staff probably know what they should be doing, and are busy getting on with it without any project management required...

Organisational Attention Deficit Disorder

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:29:17 +0100

No organisation is perfect; learning how to use these imperfections to help your project is a key part of delivering on time. One common problem I see a lot is stealing from calm and organised projects to throw attention and manpower at troubled projects. However there is a period before a deadline where attention and help can be commanded and, more importantly, maintained without having resources stolen by another project...

Site redesign

Fri, 9 Oct 2009 18:32:27 +0100

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on the old site design, the new version incorporates a lot of the suggestions made. I hope you find it easier to use now - if not it would be great to hear which bits can be improved.

Good days and bad days

Wed, 7 Oct 2009 08:21:52 +0100

I have been talking to a lot of project managers recently to get the trial for The Plan Is under way. One of the things that stands out is that the job is very similar regardless of the field, and that our good and bad days have a lot in common...

Month one, and it's already going wrong

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:54:17 +0100

The end of the first month is in sight and I already know that I'm going to miss at least a few of the milestones in my plan. This is pretty embarrassing for a business that specialises in project management. Fortunately I send out a reporting pack each month and this forces me to be honest about slips and take a look at the root cause...

Perfect versus good

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:45:19 +0100

One of the problems that gets blamed a lot for project failure is 'scope creep'. Scope creep is a diplomatic way of saying that management don't know what they want from a project and keep on changing the requirements until the whole thing falls apart in an exciting blame explosion. Invariably when this happens the project manager is fired, the actual requirements are finally documented, and the project pushes on to either success or another iteration of the scope creep spiral depending on how much work remains...

Getting Started

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:29:10 +0100

It's been a big week as Wednesday was the first day working on my new venture. Quitting was surprisingly hard to do, especially as Truphone was a pretty exciting place and the people I worked with were great. In the end though I really want to get this built and couldn't wait any longer...

Redirect

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:55:16 +0100

This post is actually at reputation widgets.