Monthly Archive for March, 2010

  • What Do You Want to be Remembered For?

  • When my daughter, Miriam, went to college in Milwaukee, she worked at a bakery. Vann’s Pastry Shop was legendary for its specialty cakes, Danish pastries, and bread. When Mr. Vann died, his obituary in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel started with the following: "Calling Bob Vann a baker would be like calling Frank Lloyd Wright an [...]

  • How Do You Feel About Being a Leader?

  • When you got the message that you were being promoted into a leadership position, I’d guess you were excited. Promotions usually mean more prestige, more opportunities, and more money. People congratulate you, offer to buy you lunch, and your picture appears in the company newsletter. Good news all the way around. Then there’s the reality. [...]

  • What Does Leadership Mean?

  • Believe it or not, there isn’t a right or wrong answer to this question. Leadership takes on different meanings depending on the person who leads and the people being led. On any given day, leadership can mean teaching, coaching, assigning, cheerleading, counseling, guiding, correcting, protecting, explaining, and observing. Leadership asks you to fill out forms, [...]

  • What are the Major Communication Skills a Project Manager Needs to Know in Order to Manage Projects Successfully?

  • As we’ve talked for some time about various communication schemes, ways for improving communications, communication barriers, and personality types, we can summarize the major aspects of what a good project manager has to know in order to be efficient communicating with the team. First of all, it is important to remember that communication skills are [...]

  • What are the Major Personality Types?

  • The knowledge of the personality types of the members of a group of people who are communicating plays an important role in providing efficient communications. Determining personality type is a widely used technique, and there are a number of classifications used. Needless to say, this technique becomes extremely important in an environment where many people [...]

  • What are the Major Barriers to Communications?

  • When certain information is being transmitted to the receiver, it has to pass through a process of decoding and filtering. Only then can it be received and interpreted by the receiver. Unfortunately, there are a number of factors that create problems in the decoding and filtering process. These are known collectively as communication barriers. A [...]

  • How Can We Increase Accuracy in Communications?

  • It is a well-known fact that 80 percent of a manager’s time is spent communicating. It is a somewhat less-known fact that the normal efficiency of communicating is pretty low: right after the information is heard by a person, he can remember only 50 percent of it, and after a month the retention falls to [...]

  • What are the Major Types of Communications?

  • Communications between persons are carried out verbally and nonverbally. Verbal communications are in the form of oral and written messages. Oral communications can be carried out through dialogues, meetings, negotiations, presentations, or telephone conversations where the main part of the information is transmitted through vocal signals. Written communications can be realized through documents in the [...]

  • What is Communications?

  • Communications is the art of transmitting an idea from the mind of one person to the mind of another, with understanding. Understanding is the key word. A classical communications model, shown in CLASSICAL COMMUNICATION MODEL, consists of a sender who is developing, coding, and transferring information through certain message channels to a receiver. When the [...]

  • What is the Percent Spent?

  • Percent spent is another simple calculation. It is the amount of the budget that has been spent. It is calculated by dividing the actual cost of work performed by the budget at completion. %spent = ACWP / BAC

  • What is the Percent Complete?

  • Percent complete is a simple calculation. It is simply the amount of work that has been completed divided by the budget at completion. %complete = BCWP / BAC Notice that the percent complete can never be greater than 100. This is because the BAC is the sum of the budget in the project. The individual [...]

  • What is the Estimate to Completion?

  • The estimate to completion or the ETC is an estimate of the additional money that will be necessary to complete the project. It is calculated from the estimate at completion that we discussed previously. ETC = EAC – ACWP Can you get into trouble with estimates at completion? You bet you can. As we have [...]

  • Is There a Similar Measure to the TCCPI for Schedules?

  • Yes, there is a calculation called the to complete schedule performance index, the TCSPI. It is similar to the TCCPI except that it calculates a required schedule performance index that will be necessary to meet the project schedule. This measure is rarely used. It is included here for completeness. It has the same problems as [...]

  • What is the to Complete Cost Performance Index?

  • The to complete cost performance index, TCCPI, tells us the required cost performance that is necessary to complete the project for the original budget based on the performance of the project as of today. Tell me more … The to complete cost performance index is a seldom-used indicator, and there are some difficulties in its [...]

  • Are There Other Ways of Calculating the EAC?

  • Yes there are, but they are not used as widely as the calculation described above, EAC = BAC / CPI. Tell me more … Taking the actual cost of work performed and adding it to the remaining work to be done can describe a somewhat more optimistic view of the EAC. This says that the [...]

  • What is the Estimate at Completion?

  • The estimate at completion, frequently shown as the EAC, is the forecast value of the project when the project is complete. It should be noted that the EAC can be calculated in a number of different ways and is only an indicator of what the project’s cost will be at the end of the project. [...]

  • What is the Schedule Performance Index?

  • The schedule performance index is a measure of how well the project is doing in terms of following the project schedule. It is a comparison of the project tasks that were planned to be accomplished to the work that was really accomplished. The index is a value that allows projects of different sizes to be [...]

  • What is the Cost Performance Index?

  • The cost performance index or CPI is a measure of how well the project is doing in terms of spending the project budget. It is a comparison of the actual expenditures to the work that was accomplished. The index is a value that allows projects of different sizes to be compared. Tell me more … [...]

  • What is Schedule Variance?

  • Schedule variance is the comparison of the amount of money that was planned to be spent on a project or part of a project to the amount of work that was actually accomplished. Tell me more … In the earned value reporting system for projects, we are concerned with knowing how our project is doing [...]

  • What is Cost Variance?

  • Cost variance (CV) is the amount of money that was actually spent on a project or a part of a project compared to the amount of work that was actually accomplished. Cost variance is the budgeted cost of work performed minus the actual cost of work performed. Tell me more … In the earned value [...]

  • What is the Budget at Completion?

  • The budget at completion (BAC) is the total operating budget allocated for the project. In the earned value reporting system, the BAC is a point that is at the end of the BCWS or PV line on the chart (see EARNED VALUE REPORT). Since the BCWS line is a plot of the budget for each [...]

  • What is an Earned Value Report?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are the Seven Tools for Quality Management?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are the Major Principles of Economics of Quality?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are the Quality Management Processes?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are the Principles of Modern Quality Management?

  • 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 [...]

  • How do Risk Management Approaches Correlate with the Other Parts of Project Management Methodology?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is Risk Control?

  • 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 [...]

  • What are Risk Response Strategies?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is Risk Tolerance?

  • 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 [...]

  • What is Risk Quantification?

  • 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 [...]