Featured Papers
November/December 2005
Editorial | Viewpoints | Papers | Case Studies | Tips & Techniques | Community | Scene | Publications
- The Future of Scheduling? Scheduling Has No Future! By Murray Woolf
- Multi Project Management (MPM) at Project-based Companies by Hiroshi Tanaka
- Difficulties in Selling Project Management to Businesses by Laurence Nicholson
- Accurate Project Costs -- How to Obtain Them, Improve Estimates With Them and Dramatically Increase Your Effectiveness by Knowing Them by Curt Finch
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The Future of Scheduling? Scheduling Has No Future!
By Murray Woolf
The field of Project Scheduling has undergone a history of growth and evolution brought on, in no small way, by methodological and technological changes. Yet, the profession's self-view has not kept pace with its increasingly prominent and diverse role in project management. As a result, it now lacks sufficient labels to describe the many different functions performed by the professional project scheduler. The term "scheduling" does not adequately describe the suite of products and services performed by an array of project management professionals whose only common thread is the project schedule. A complete set of definitions of roles and responsibilities is needed.
Looking forward, further radical changes in the profession are just around the corner. The encompassing field of project management, of which scheduling is a central part, is moving away from Newtonian structures to management models more aligned with chaos theory. As this transition occurs, the role of the project scheduler will give way to a new position -- project facilitator. While the end goal may be the same - to assist the project manager in driving the project - the methodologies, technologies, and philosophies will be much different. Scheduling, as both a profession, is about to undergo a complete makeover.
Read the full text at The Future of Scheduling? Scheduling Has No Future!
About the Author:
Mr.
Woolf is a Senior Executive Consultant with Long International. He has
over 27 years of project management, project controls, training, consulting
and expert witness experience. He spent the early part of his career
providing project management and project controls services on over 125
projects worldwide, with combined value estimated at around $28 billion.
In
addition to his responsibilities within Long International, Mr. Woolf also
serves as Managing Director of the PMI College of Scheduling's Scheduling
Excellence Initiative (SEI). Operating within PMI's College of Scheduling,
of which Mr. Woolf is a charter member, SEI's ambitious goal is to
establish, for the first time ever, an authoritative context for the
practice of professional planning and scheduling, including standardization
of terminology, methodology, and philosophy, improved scheduling software,
court-recognized professional standards, improved collegiate coursework,
and
an innovation incubator for emerging technologies.
Multi Project Management (MPM) at Project-based Companies
by Hiroshi Tanaka
Engineering and construction contractors are typical project-based companies in which project management is undoubtedly a core business competency. Project development with their clients, securing contracts for, planning, engineering and constructing industrial plants on clients' behalf require superb project management skills. However, this mandate does not necessarily translate into the fact that contractor organizations are performing satisfactory multi project management (MPM) of projects in their hands. In fact, while managers of projects have a good perspective for single projects, they quite often lack "helicopter" management capability for project operations of their divisions. If single-project management mentality is expanded to managing a group of projects, odds are that managers of projects do not do any better than a mere aggregation of project management of individual projects.
The Project Management Committee of the Engineering Advancement Association of Japan, the Japanese engineering and construction industry initiative, has carried out research on the state of multi project management and crafted a proposal to capitalize on best practices in this management genre.
Read the full text at Multi Project Management (MPM) at Project-based Companies.
About the Author:
Hiroshi
(Hiro) Tanaka is the PMFORUM Correspondent for Japan and is the founder and the National President of the Japan Project Management Forum (JPMF), fellow and special project management delegate of ENAA, Japan and is one of the distinguished leaders of the global PM community. He was an invited speaker at PM conferences in 15 countries. Hiro is also a member of PMI, IPMA-PMA (India; fellow), IPMA-SOVNET (Russia), AIPM, PMCC (Japan) and SPM (Japan).
by Laurence Nicholson
We are all familiar with the problems of justifying IT project spend because of the notorious difficulties in providing tangible, below the line savings. It is a similar story when trying to sell Project Management to businesses that do not understand the benefits.
We all know that when a project is managed properly, it stands every chance of coming in on time and on budget, but this is the 'starting point' for busy executives who do not pay much attention to the statistics of typical project performance. So simply using the prospect of staying within the budget and schedule will not engender any reaction within the executive board to spend money on what they see as 'expensive' Project Managers.
How, then, do we change this to make these decision makers sit up and listen?
Read the full text at Difficulties in Selling Project Management to Businesses
About the Author:
Laurence
Nicholson is a PMP and a Fellow of the Association of International Professional
Managers (FPMA). He has been leading international technology projects
for over 18 years at all levels, and 5 years ago was the first employee
of ‘Xoomworks’, a start-up Consultancy, where he now heads
the Project Management Practice as a Senior Manager.
Accurate Project Costs -- How to Obtain Them, Improve Estimates With Them and Dramatically Increase Your Effectiveness by Knowing Them
by Curt Finch
Critical Business Issue (CBI) - Something that might get me fired or put in jail if I screw it up again.
For most IT managers, inaccurate estimates constitute a CBI. Why are accurate estimates so important?
1. Inaccurate estimates cause over-commitment. Have you ever worked in a place where ten percent of ten projects got done instead of 100 percent of one project? Ultimately, nothing is accomplished and everyone is totally stressed out. Inaccurate estimates cause over-commitment of time, yet not much gets done.
2. Inaccurate estimates cause bad decisions. "Inaccurate" usually means "too low." When this happens, the return on investment (ROI) calculation shows the project as 'worth it' when it is not.
Read the full text at Accurate Project Costs -- How to Obtain Them, Improve Estimates With Them and Dramatically Increase Your Effectiveness by Knowing Them
About the Author:
Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx (http://pr.journyx.com), a provider of
Web-based software located in Austin, Texas, that automates billing, payroll & project
management by tracking time, expenses and mileage. Finch is a software
industry veteran. In 1997, Curt created the world's first Internet-based
timesheet application and the foundation for the current Journyx product
offering. Curt has managed development teams creating enterprise-level
software solutions since 1985, with a focus on distributed workforce management.
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