Adeak Blog

The concept of leadership behavior started to be developed before World War II and is still popular because those theories consider the opportunity for leaders to be trained according to special types of programs.
The best-known classical theory of behavioral leadership is Douglas McGregor’s Theory X–Theory Y concept of management. McGregor distinguished between those managers [...]

In overall management theory, the recent trends consider distinguishing strongly between leadership and managerial qualities. According to this view, managers and leaders have certain major differences in a number of areas, including:
Psychological personality profile: Administrative for a manager and innovative for a leader.
Type of power and approach to making people do things: Administratively [...]

Leadership is defined as the ability to influence groups of people in order to make them work and achieve prescribed goals.
Leadership, as a type of managerial interrelationship between the leader and the followers, is based on the combination of authority types most efficient for the current situation. Therefore, it is a function of the [...]

In recent years Eliyahu M. Goldratt has developed several interesting ideas about project management. One of the more controversial ideas is his theory of critical chains. This is a method of adjusting schedules to reduce the probability of projects being late.
Using the critical chain theory involves delaying activities’ schedules until the activities are scheduled [...]

The Monte Carlo process is a simulation technique that is used to statistically predict the duration of a project when there is uncertainty about the duration of the activities of the project. Simulation techniques are used because the number of simultaneous algebraic equations would become quite large even for small projects.
PERT analysis of project [...]

A buffered schedule is one to which free float has deliberately been added. It is when we take negotiated additional schedule time and add it to the schedule as planned delays between the finish of activities and the start of activities that are dependent on them. It does not make sense to buffer any of [...]

Crashing and fast-tracking a schedule are ways of reducing the length of a project schedule. Crashing is a general term for reducing project schedules. When we crash a schedule, we spend money or resources to reduce the scheduled time for the project in such a way that we do the things that have the greatest [...]

A resource histogram is one of the tools given to us by the companies that produce project management software to help the allocation of resources in project plans. Automatic resource leveling does not usually give us the best solution to a resource allocation problem. Until we have good artificial intelligence programs to help us, automatic [...]

A summary or hammock activity, shown in ACTIVITY CHART , is used to represent groups of activities in a project schedule. It is used to summarize the schedule information for a group of activities and to allow the entire project to be summarized as a relatively few summary activities. The summary activity shows the start [...]

A milestone is used to represent groups of activities or significant events or commitments in the project. A milestone chart shows a group of milestones in an organized way similar to a Gantt chart with one milestone per line vertically with a description on the left and the milestone located horizontally along a time scale [...]

The PERT method stands for program evaluation and review technique. It is a statistical approach to project schedules. Actually, it is a statistical way of predicting project completions when there is uncertainty about the project durations.
The PERT method was developed during the Polaris Missile program in the United States in the 1950s. At that [...]

The critical path method or CPM is a management tool that helps the project manager recognize where in the project schedule his management effort should be applied. The critical path method recognizes that the activities in the schedule that have zero float are the activities that cannot be delayed without delaying the completion of the [...]

A Gantt chart, as seen in GANTT CHART, is used to show the project schedule in a graphic form.
It is probably the most used graphic report in project management and may be the most used of any of the reports used in project management. The Gantt chart is about 100 years old and was [...]

First of all, float and slack are two words that mean the same thing. It is perfectly fine to use either term in project management. Float is a measure of flexibility in the project schedule. There are two kinds of float, total float and free float. Total float is usually called float. (Sometimes it seems [...]

In its simplest form the calculation of the schedule is a matter of establishing a start date for the project and adding the durations of the activities in the schedule, being careful not to include the activities that are scheduled to be done in parallel with other activities. The schedule consists of determining the start [...]

The early start, early finish, late start, and late finish dates of a project schedule are the primary dates that are calculated in any project schedule. The early start dates of the project schedule are the earliest that any activity in the schedule can be scheduled to start given the logic and constraints of the [...]

Network diagrams are used in many ways, from engineering to computer programming to management. In project management the network diagram is usually associated with the scheduling function. The network diagram for a schedule shows the logical relationships between the activities of the schedule for a project.
The activities are taken two at a time. The [...]

Depreciation is important to project managers because it has an effect on the overall justification of a project, equipment, and other capital assets that are used on projects and the profitability of projects to the company. Depreciation can make a difference between a project that is justified and one that is not. It can also [...]

There are several measures that are useful in measuring the health of a company. These measures are also useful in measuring the health of a project. The trend in project management is to have the project manager take on more and more responsibility for the projects she is managing. Project managers in the future will [...]

Project managers and project management methods are becoming more widely known, and project management successes are becoming more frequent. For this reason project managers are being given more responsibility in the businesses they work in. It has become more important that project managers treat their projects like small businesses and that they be responsible for [...]

The time value of money refers to the fact that money we receive in the future is worth less to us than money we receive today. If you loaned us $100 today and we paid you back the $100 two years from now, it would not be fair to you because we have had the [...]

Cost budgeting or setting the cost baseline for a project is very important since it forms the foundation for the measurement of performance in the project. Ultimately our performance measurement system is going to measure the actual costs of the project in terms of time and quantity and compare that to the planned expenditures in [...]

There are two kinds of reserves set up to budget for risks: the contingency reserve and the management reserve. The contingency reserve contains the money to do the risks that were identified. The management reserve contains the money to do the risks that were not identified. These two reserves are separated in order to have [...]

The cost baseline is the basis for the earned value reporting system. It is the budget for the estimated cost of the project spread over the time periods of the project. As we noted in project, in managing a project we are concerned about three baselines: the schedule baseline, the cost baseline, and the scope [...]

A cost improvement curve is based loosely on the idea of a learning curve. In some contracts, generally large ones, the client may require the vendor to reduce the price of items supplied later in the project to less than the delivery price of earlier items of the project. The application of cost improvement curves [...]

The law of diminishing returns says that each time we do something to receive a benefit, the benefit will be less and less. The best way to think of this is by a simple example. If we are with a small child on a hot summer day and we pass an ice cream stand and [...]

Estimating cost means developing the approximate cost of completing the entire project or part of it. It is the expected quantitative result. When we estimate the cost of doing a project, we are estimating the amount of money that it will take to complete the entire project.
In addition to the project completion cost, we [...]

Statistical cost estimating is a method of using statistics to determine the range of values of a cost estimate and the probability that the actual cost will occur between the two values in the range. This is the same technique that is discussed in the PERT method that is discussed in Time Management under "What [...]

Life cycle cost is the cost that is associated with the project from the beginning of the project to the end of its useful life and beyond. It includes the cost of acquiring the project, operating it, and disposing of it at the end of its useful life. It may even include money spent after [...]

Productivity and utilization are the two factors we are concerned with when doing estimating for projects. Both of these factors are applicable to cost as well as schedule estimates. Productivity is a measure of how much faster or slower a particular resource is from the normal resource. A person who is very good or very [...]

The terms used in estimating are related to the use of project management software. Because of the defaults used in project management software, we have been using these terms in our estimates.
Effort: The hours of labor to do work. Effort is usually expressed as man-hours or people-hours but could be expressed as man-days, man-months, [...]