Monthly Archive for February, 2010

  • What is Risk Identification?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are the Basic Steps in Risk Management?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is Risk Management?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is a Change Process and What are its Stages?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is Organizational Change and What are the Specific Characteristics of Project Management Methodology as Applied to Change Projects?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are the Major Spheres for Change and the Problems Associated with Them?

  • 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 [...]

  • How do Organizations Affect the Projects and How Does Project Management Influence Organizations?

  • 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 [...]

  • What Does Moving Toward Matrix Management Require?

  • 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 [...]

  • Why Would We Want to Use an Unbalanced Matrix Organization?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is a Balanced Matrix Organization?

  • 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 [...]

  • How do I Organize for Project Management?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are the Tools and Rules for Human Resource Coordination in Projects?

  • 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 [...]

  • What Does the Staff Acquisition Process Include?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are the Main Types of Power?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are the Major Theories of Motivation?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is Delegation?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is a Team Role Structure?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are the Concepts of Job Enrichment and Job Enlargement?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are the Major Team Leader Skills?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is a Project 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 [...]

  • What are the Major Theories of Behavioral and Situational Leadership?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is the Difference Between Management and Leadership?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is Leadership?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is Goldratt’s Critical Chain Theory?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is the Monte Carlo Process?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is a Buffered Schedule?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is Crashing and Fast-Tracking a Schedule?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is a Resource Histogram?

  • 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 [...]