Confirming Your Project’s Justification
A key requirement for project management success is knowing why the project was created in the first place. In addition to helping ensure that the appropriate objectives and desired results are framed [more…]
Developing Meaningful Project Objectives
As a project manager, developing concise and unambiguous project objectives (or statements of your project’s desired results) increases the chances that you’ll successfully accomplish them. Follow these [more…]
Project Management For Dummies Cheat Sheet
Because of the ever-growing array of huge, complex, and technically challenging projects in today’s world, project management has become a critical skill. People need special tools, techniques, and knowledge [more…]
PRINCE2 For Dummies Cheat Sheet (UK Edition)
PRINCE2 is an essential project management method, helping users organise, manage and direct their projects to time and within budget. This Cheat Sheet presents you with a few tips and wrinkles to get [more…]
Project Management: How to Determine Project Needs
As a project manager you should have a full understanding of your project’s needs. The needs that your project addresses may not always be obvious. Suppose, for example, that your organization decides [more…]
Performing a Cost-Benefit Analysis
Whether you know it as a cost-benefit analysis or a benefit-cost analysis, performing one is critical to any project. When you perform a cost-benefit analysis, you make a comparative assessment of all [more…]
What Your Project Plan Should Cover
When you know the goal of your project and you believe it’s possible, you need a detailed project plan that describes how you and your team will make it happen. Include the following in your project-management [more…]
How to Plan Project Execution
After you’ve developed your project-management plan and set your appropriate project baselines, it’s time to get to work and start executing your project plan. This is often the phase when management gets [more…]
Assessing Your Project-Management Skills
An effective project manager has specific skills and talents. Before you begin a project, take this quick self-evaluation to determine your project-management strengths and weaknesses. By answering the [more…]
What to Include in a Project Scope Statement
The Scope Statement is an essential element of any project. Project managers use a Scope Statement to outline the results their project will produce and the terms and conditions under which they will perform [more…]
Project Management: How to State Your Project’s Objectives
Managing a project calls for clear objectives. After all, a project’s outcomes may be the products or services you develop or the results of using these products and services. The more clearly you define [more…]
How to Define Where Your Project Starts and Stops
Sometimes the project you're managing stands alone, but, more often, it’s one part of related efforts to achieve a common result. Manage the project by clearly defining the beginning and end to help you [more…]
Project Management: How to Clarify Project Goals
As a project manager, nail down goals before you start planning project-execution details. In your quest to find out what your project is supposed to accomplish and how it fits into your organization’s [more…]
Project Management: How to Define Project Constraints
Project limitations may influence how you manage your project and may even determine whether or not you (and your project’s drivers and supporters) decide to proceed with your project. Project limitations [more…]
How to Develop a Work Breakdown Structure by Brainstorming
How you develop you’re work breakdown schedule (WBS) for a project you're managing depends on how familiar you and your team are with your project, whether similar projects have been successfully performed [more…]
How to Develop a Project Audience List
As a project manager, consider your project audience list to be a living document. You need to start developing your list as soon as you begin thinking about your project. Write down any names that occur [more…]
When to Involve Your Project Audience
As a project manager you have to decide when it's appropriate to involve the audience you defined in your project list. Keeping the project audience involved is important and can contribute to your project’s [more…]
Maximizing Audience Involvement in Your Project
The project you're managing will benefit if you keep the audience (whether they're groups or individuals) involved through meetings and written communication. To maximize your audiences’ involvement and [more…]
How to Check Your Project Audience's Authority
When you involve an audience in the project you are managing, mistaking a person's level of authority can lead to frustration, as well as wasted time and money. Confirm that the people you've identified [more…]
Four Key Questions to Ask About Organizational Detail
Determining how much detail you need in a work breakdown structure (WBS) isn’t a trivial task. As the project manager, you want to describe your work in sufficient detail to support accurate planning and [more…]
How to Plan a Long-Term Project
Planning and managing a long-term project presents special challenges. Often the work you perform a year or more in the future depends on the results of the work you do between now and then. Even if you [more…]
How to Determine Precedence in Your Project’s Network Diagram
To draw your project’s network diagram, you first have to decide the order of your project’s activities and that means setting precedence. Although some tasks have to be performed in a specific order, [more…]
How to Develop Your Project’s Schedule
Project management involves creating and maintaining your project’s schedule. Developing a project schedule requires the combination of activities, resources, and activity-performance sequences that gives [more…]
Project Management: How to Estimate Activity Duration
Part of creating a project plan for any project you manage involves estimating how long each activity will take to complete. A duration estimate is your best sense of how long you need to actually perform [more…]
How to Improve Activity Duration Estimates when Managing Projects
To manage a project and keep it on track, you need to produce accurate activity duration estimates during the planning process. In addition to ensuring accurate and complete data, do the following to improve [more…]
