How to Identify Risk Factors in Your Project
A risk factor is a situation that may give rise to one or more project risks. A risk factor itself doesn’t cause you to miss a product, schedule, or resource target. However, it increases the chances that [more…]
Identify Specific Risks Associated with Project Risk Factors
After you recognize your project’s risk factors, the next step in your project risk assessment is to identify the specific risks that may result from each of your risk factors. With this information in [more…]
Assessing the Likelihood of a Risk in Your Project
As you refine your project’s schedule, you need to assess the various risks that you have identified. Determining the likelihood of each risk will help you manage risk if the worst happens. The first step [more…]
Project Management: Key Players in a Matrix Environment
In a matrix environment, key players have critical roles in every project's success. Working in a matrix environment requires that the project manager deal with the styles, interests, and demands of more [more…]
How to Create and Maintain a Team Identity
Creating a team identity can help you manage your project. But often, the people you collect to work on your project don’t know one another. You can use the tips here to help your project participants [more…]
How Responsibility and Authority Affect Project-Team Roles
Each project-team member has a responsibility to reach specific goals; and a few members might assume some authority to help others achieve those goals. As a project manager, you have to assign people [more…]
Project Management: How to Decide What to Delegate
To be an effective project manager, you must learn to delegate — that is, get the help and support of your project’s team members. Knowing why you delegate helps you determine which tasks to turn over [more…]
Project Management: Tips for Delegating to Achieve Results
Project managers know that the purpose of delegating isn't to lighten anyone's workload; rather, it's to achieve results. Delegation always involves some risk because you have to live with the consequences [more…]
Holding People Accountable When They Don’t Report to You
Project managers sometimes face the problem of working with people who don't report to them administratively. If such a person falls through on a promise to get something done for your project, then holding [more…]
Understanding Accountability as a Management-Control Process
Accountability is a management-control process. Responding to a person’s actions lets the person know whether he’s on target or whether he needs to make a correction. Not responding to unacceptable performance [more…]
How to Develop a Responsibility Assignment Matrix
Project managers like to use a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) to define the roles of the various project team members. Despite the straightforward nature of the information included in the RAM, [more…]
How to Develop a Risk-Management Strategy
Managing risk is an important task for any project manager. After you have determined what risks exist for your project and assessed their importance, you need to choose a strategy for dealing with each [more…]
How to Communicate Project Risks
As a project manager you know that projects involve risks. Communicating those risks is a special skill. People often share information about project risks ineffectually or not at all. As a result, their [more…]
How to Prepare a Risk-Management Plan
Managing risk, like it or not, is a part of a project manager’s reality. A risk-management plan lays out strategies to minimize the negative effects that uncertain occurrences can have on your project. [more…]
Depicting Roles with a Responsibility Assignment Matrix
One way you can display team roles and responsibilities is in a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) — also called a Linear Responsibility Chart (LRC). Defining and sharing team roles and responsibilities [more…]
How to Display Your Project's Schedule
Unless all your project activities are on a critical path, your network diagram doesn't specify your exact schedule. Rather, it provides information for you to consider when you develop your schedule. [more…]
How to Plan Personnel Needs for Projects
As a project manager, you must determine how many people you'll need to complete the project on time. Planning personnel needs begins with identifying whom you need and how much effort they have to invest [more…]
How to Resolve Project Resource Overloads
Even if your project resource estimates are accurate, people who work on your project team can get overloaded. Consider one or more of the following strategies to eliminate your overcommitment and get [more…]
How to Schedule Your Project Workloads
Examining the workload of each member of the project team is the first step in making sure he or she can handle all project workloads. You can help them decide when they’ll work on each activity. If your [more…]
Project Management: How to Coordinate Overlapping Tasks
Overlapping tasks places conflicting demands on your team members. Although successfully addressing tasks that overlap can be more difficult when more than one project manager is involved, the techniques [more…]
How to Determine Nonpersonnel Resource Needs
The project you are managing may require a variety of important resources (such as furniture, fixtures, equipment, raw materials, and information). Plan for these nonpersonnel resources the same way you [more…]
How to Estimate Risk Consequences
After you identify the likelihood that a particular risk will affect the project you're managing, be sure to determine the magnitude of the consequences or effects that may result. That magnitude directly [more…]
Using the Functional Structure to Administer Projects
Project managers need tools for overseeing their projects. The functional organization structure brings together people who perform similar tasks or who use the same kinds of skills and knowledge in functional [more…]
Using a Projectized Structure to Administer Your Project
Many project managers use a projectized organization structure to administer their projects. This type of structure groups together all personnel working on a particular project. Project team members are [more…]
Using a Matrix Structure to Administer Your Project
Many project managers have adopted a matrix organization structure that combines elements of both the functional and projectized structures to facilitate the responsive and effective participation of people [more…]
