How to Work with a Micromanager
Working with a micromanager can be difficult if you don't know how to manage the micromanager. If your boss scrutinizes every move on your project, questions your decisions and methods, and gives unsolicited [more…]
How to Confirm Team Members’ Participation in a Project
As you start your project, you need to confirm the identities of the people who’ll work to support your project. To do so, verify that specific people are still able to uphold their promised commitments [more…]
How to Develop Your Project Team
Merely assigning people to tasks doesn’t create a project team. Any good project manager knows that a team is a collection of people who are committed to common goals and who depend on one another to do [more…]
How to Specify Team Member Roles and Procedures
An effective project manager needs to specify team-member roles and communication procedures. After all, nothing causes disillusionment and frustration faster on a project than bringing motivated people [more…]
How Project Managers Help Teams Function Well
A project manager knows she has a well-functioning when team members trust each other; have confidence in each other’s abilities; can count on each other’s promises; and communicate openly. A well-functioning [more…]
How to Maintain Control of Your Project
Whether you're a novice or veteran at project management, the process of maintaining control over projects is the same: You track project-plan details and expenditures, deal with team members, and monitor [more…]
Managing a Project with a Project-Management Information System
Savvy project managers use a project-management information system (PMIS) to keep their projects organized. A PMIS is a set of procedures, equipment, and other resources for collecting, analyzing, storing [more…]
How to Monitor Work Effort
When you're managing a project, comparing work effort expended with work effort planned can highlight when people are incorrectly expanding or reducing the scope of an activity; are more or less qualified [more…]
How to Monitor Project Expenditures
Project managers monitor project expenditures to verify that they’re in accordance with the project plan and, if they’re not, to address any deviations. You may think that you can determine project funds [more…]
How to Track and Analyze Project Expenditures
To evaluate your project’s financial status, you compare actual expenditures with those you planned. Project managers use a cost report that presents expenditures for the current performance period and [more…]
How to Formalize Your Project Control Process
Every project manager has his or her own way of setting up project control processes. To guide your project throughout its performance, you must establish procedures to collect and submit required progress [more…]
How to Identify and Correct Causes of Project Delays
An effective project manager tracks every aspect of a project as it progresses in order to identify and correct causes of delays. After you confirm that a problem exists, you have to understand what caused [more…]
How to Manage Project Change Requests
How project managers handle project change requests depends on individual management styles. On large projects, formal change-control systems govern how you can receive, assess, and act on requests for [more…]
Earned Value Management Terms and Formulas for Project Managers
The basic premise of earned value management (EVM) is that the value of a piece of work is equal to the amount of funds budgeted to complete it. As part of EVM, you use the following information to assess [more…]
How to Determine a Task’s Earned Value
The key to a meaningful EVM (earned value management) analysis lies in the accuracy of your estimates of earned value (EV). To determine EV, you must estimate how much of a task you’ve completed to date [more…]
How to Plan for Your Project’s Completion
New project managers may not realize this, but planning for the completion of a project should be part of the initial project plan. If you wait until the end of your project to start thinking in detail [more…]
How to Keep Team Members Focused on a Project
At the start of a project, staying committed to the overall goals of a project can be easy for a team. As the project progresses, however, a project manager may need to refocus team members' energies. [more…]
What to Do When You Complete a Project
So you're about to complete your (successful) project. Filing the final report, however, isn't the project manager's last task. You need to help your team members transition off the project, acknowledge [more…]
How Project Managers Write Useful Reports
Writing useful reports is part of a project manager's repertoire of good communications skills. Written reports enable a project manager to present factual data efficiently; to choose words carefully to [more…]
Project Manager Skill: How to Run Productive Meetings
Project meetings don’t have to be painful experiences. If you plan and manage them well, project meetings can be effective forms of communication. They can help you find out about other team members’ backgrounds [more…]
How to Write an Interesting Progress Report for Projects
As a project manager, you write progress reports to let people know how the project is going. When you write your project-progress report, make sure it’s interesting and tells the appropriate people what [more…]
How to Use Meetings to Manage Your Project
At work, just saying meeting can induce groans; but meetings are an effective way to manage projects. Three kinds of meetings help keep project players engaged: regularly scheduled meetings, [more…]
How to Be an Effective Project Leader
Leadership and management are two related but distinct sets of behaviors for guiding and supporting people through a project. Project managers must be able to lead and manage to keep team members on track [more…]
Project Management: How to Motivate Team Members
Efficient processes and smooth relationships create the opportunity for successful projects. And having team members personally commit to your project’s success gives you the greatest chance of achieving [more…]
How to Keep Team Members Committed to Your Project
When managing a project, you have to keep people committed to it until the end. Although some people commit to completing an assignment because someone tells them to do so, you get a much more serious [more…]
