The USA has set a high standard for the profession of project management globally with the passing into law of the Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act (PMIAA). The PMIAA reforms USA federal program management policy in four important ways: Creating a formal job series and career path for program […]
Crystal Consulting
55 posts
I’m not sure what inspired to me to write this post. It may have been seeing yet another advertisement pop-up for a project management tool guaranteed to deliver successful projects. It may have been a project manager telling me that their latest process was so good it practically guaranteed project […]
Have you ever been in a scenario like this? A project manager tells you that the project is halfway through, but has only spent 30% of the budget and therefore everything is going well. What’s missing from the statement is, of course, the amount of work that you expected to […]
Total Quality Management (TQM) is an accepted part of quality management and customer satisfaction in many organizations. While it has a broad range of interpretation and application, it has some consistent principles which define it. They are: Everyone in the organization recognizes that quality is central to organizational success Everyone […]
The Project Management Institute (PMI) has just released the exposure draft of The PMBOK® Guide 6th edition for review and comment. I will try to summarize the major changes. I won’t go into the level of detail around specific tools and techniques but instead focus on proposed changes to knowledge areas and […]
** Please email me for a copy of the card deck that you can print out to start brainstorming your own methodology As a project management consultant I have often been asked to provide clients with an off-the-shelf, or readymade, project management methodology. In one sense this is good thing […]
Have you ever played the game of dominos? I did many years ago and I was never very good at it. If you remember the game, it involves trying to place your dominoes in some sort of order to block and beat your opponent. The other great thing you can […]
Carrying out project audits are a great way to discover what is going well and not so well with your projects. The focus for the audit should be on improvement not punishment so make sure that the process is focused upon repeating the good things you discover and stopping the […]
One of the greatest challenges we face as project managers is a focus on outputs over outcomes. Generally, projects are initiated to deal with a particular outcome (or benefit). A problem or opportunity has been identified and the project has been established to provide a solution. The objective is that […]
More and more research clearly indicates that organizations with a PMO deliver more successful projects than organizations without a PMO, yet that same research also tells us that a lot of organizations fail to see the benefits of a PMO, and some organizations are even getting rid of their PMO’s. […]