Adeak Blog

An earned value report is the preferred method for measuring progress in projects. It has the advantage of showing on one piece of paper the pertinent performance criteria for a project. From the earned value report the time-phased, planned expenditures for the project can be seen along with the actual cost of the project work [...]

The so-called Seven Tools for Quality Management form a basis for overall TQM methodology. In general, all the tools are based on two major approaches: statistics and team involvement. We can formulate their major goal as a set of instruments to unite the team around some of the quality issues for discussion, prediction, and preventive [...]

As in most of the decision-making processes in project management, when we consider the opportunity to improve our management functions we normally look first at what is called the cost-benefit analysis. In other words, when we are thinking about quality improvement for our product, our first concern is to see if this is cost-efficient for [...]

The quality management function of the project can be described as:

Assuring conformance to mutually agreed to expectations.
Assuring conformance to requirements and specifications.
Assuring conformance to ALL the characteristics that allow it to satisfy the function intended.

The transfer of initially assumed needs to planned ones is the critical aspect of quality management in [...]

Modern quality management approaches relate in many ways to modern project management approaches overall. More and more attention is being paid to the human aspect of the processes, the team approach to quality, and the concept of total quality management. The quality management process is more oriented toward permanent small incremental improvements and multiple inspection [...]

Risk management is, in reality, not a special, separate process that is being carried out somewhere else in a company. In a normal project, risk management is so much interrelated with all the other project management processes that some of the experienced project managers we know in practice do not even want to consider it [...]

The process of monitoring and controlling and keeping track of the identified and the unidentified risks is risk control. In this process we hope to identify risks that are no longer possible and risks that are coming due, as well as any new risks that may become evident. We will also monitor risk activity to [...]

Risk response strategies are the approaches we can make to dealing with the risks we have identified and quantified. In the section on risk quantification we discussed evaluating the risk in terms of its impact and probability in such a way that we would be able to rank risks in their order of importance. This [...]

Risk tolerance is the willingness of some person or some organization to accept or avoid risk. In any group of people there are gamblers or risk takers and there are nongamblers or risk avoiders. People who have a low willingness to accept risks and the consequences of risks are called risk avoiders. Those people who [...]

Risk quantification is the process of evaluating the risks that have been identified and developing the data that will be needed for making decisions as to what should be done about them. Risk management is done from very early in the project until the very end. For this reason qualitative analysis should be used at [...]

The first step in risk management is identifying the risks that we will see in our project. These are the things that threaten to stop us from delivering what we have promised on the schedule we promised for the budget we promised. If we were completely certain about everything in the project and how it [...]

There are usually four steps considered in managing any risk. This will vary from author to author, so we will stick with the Project Management Institute’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. The PMBOK lists the steps in the risk process as follows:

Risk identification
Risk quantification
Risk response
Risk control

Tell me [...]

A risk is a possible unplanned event. It can be positive or negative. In project management the success of our projects depends on our ability to predict a particular outcome. Since risks are the unpredictable part of the project, it is important for us to be able to control them as much as possible and [...]

The change process has two intermediate, somewhat "invisible" phases and three formal change stages. The process starts with the preliminary phase of understanding the need for change. This is illustrated in Change Stages And Project Processes.
After that, the change should follow these three stages:

Building the foundation for a change
Building the concept of [...]

By a strategic event we normally mean an impact in time and scope change in corporation life that influences the whole corporation or a significant part of it. Very often a strategic event is called a strategic change.
The examples of strategic change may include:
Political changes of the company status: Merging, selling parts of [...]

Any change event can be efficient only if the implementation takes into consideration and keeps a harmonic balance among the three spheres of change:

Personal Sphere. Introducing any change will always be related to overcoming the inertia of the old type of thinking and the old way of doing things. This is especially true when [...]

Every project is implemented within a certain type of home organization. This is true even for project organizations that are set up specifically for a certain project. In many cases, the culture and environment of the home organization influence the remote project development.
One of the strongest factors affecting every project implementation is the organizational [...]

As has already been mentioned, the process of developing a matrix organizational structure in your company takes lots of time and effort in order to be efficient. The overall transition may take a couple of years and may pass through a number of intermediate stages. Different stages of transfer from a functional organization to a [...]

During the transition from the functional organization to the matrix organization, it may be necessary to go through several interim organizations. This can be most easily done by first changing to a weak matrix organization where the functional managers retain most of their power and the project managers have very little power. As the project [...]

Matrix management organizations are difficult to manage properly. One of the difficulties in matrix management is balancing the level of authority between the functional manager and the project manager. If the project manager has too much authority, too many of the people in the functional organization will be taken from that organization and assigned improperly [...]

Projects work best in a balanced matrix type of organization. This is because the resources of the company are permanent and projects are not. We remember that the definition of a project is "… a temporary endeavor…." Project teams are formed for the life of a project. This means that we are able to bring [...]

As mentioned before, the normal project-oriented environment is often extremely complicated from the viewpoint of the organizational structure. In order to decrease the degree of confusion and argument, the project managers have to undertake every effort possible in order to apply some structure to human resource distribution and coordination between different projects and operational activities [...]

The content of the staff acquisition process in projects is different from the general staff recruiting procedures for the organization. In The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, it is considered to be one of the facilitating processes in the planning process group. In projects, the project manager does not actually recruit personnel [...]

In projects, a very important function required of a project manager is influencing the organization—in other words, "making things work". That involves having a good knowledge of both the formal and informal systems of the home organization of the project, as well as the client, subcontractors, and other stakeholders. The ability to influence the organization [...]

The term motivation is defined as the process of inducing a person to function actively in order to achieve certain goals. The influence of motivation on people’s behavior depends on a number of factors. It is very individual and changeable relative to various stimuli and feedback reactions to people’s activities.
By motive we normally mean [...]

The term delegation describes the process used by a manager to shift some of the responsibilities for the task implementation to another team member. Delegation is key to improving team members’ feelings of involvement and ownership, and the ability to delegate is therefore considered to be an extremely important skill for a project manager.
The [...]

The role structure of the team determines the content and distribution of different roles within the team. The knowledge and ability to use the structure of roles within the team is a strong and efficient instrument of human resource management in the project team.
There are three major types of roles we can see in [...]

The concept of job enlargement was developed as a result of the investigations targeted on the improvement of group efficiency and motivation in the early 1960s. The major reason for the investigation was the need for companies to improve the productivity of their employees. The basic concept had to do with the fact that people [...]

As we discussed in the part of this chapter describing the differences between management and leadership, the project manager is also often required to be able to fulfill the functions of a project leader. As such, he has to be able to:

Set clear goals and make certain that they are followed.
Assist other team [...]

A project team is defined as a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance, goals, and approach. It could also be described as an assembly of people who are directly or indirectly accountable to the project manager.
However, the degree of accountability and the amount of power [...]

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 [...]