Concepts

The essence of project management is the anchor point for every project manager and the thread that runs through the whole of the project.

One reason why projects fail may certainly be the ever increasing complexity of projects. But it can also be that the used project control instruments are simply not good enough.

In order to not get lost in all this complexity a rigorous project control is necessary. But what makes a good project status report?

Projects are a set of deliverables that build on each other. Sometimes, some of these deliverables are delivered late or — once delivered — of unsatisfactory quality.

This is quite an innovative and far-reaching thought for project controlling. Independent on which hierarchical level you view a project you can always use the same template layout.

The area around the project is called the context of the project. It is important to distinguish between what happens within the project and in the outer context of the project and to understand how project and context mutually impact each other...

Project tend to be complex and require many activities. In order to be efficient it makes sense to specify roles and responsibilities so that task ownership is clear. In every company ...

In one word, projects are change. Projects change an existing situation into a new situation. In the technical world this is called State-Action-State and this concept is widely applied. The concept of State-Action-State is also useful to understand the categories of projects in a company.

If you believe that the eternal struggle goes on between heaven and earth, or between fire and water, then you are wrong. The eternal struggle takes place in companies between line functions and projects.

The management and control of projects require experience, skills and support. The more of this is provided in a systematic and prepared form by a company the more likely is efficient project work and project success. A score helps to establish ...

If a project starts to lag behind or if it is already significantly delayed and has time or expense budget overruns, management not seldom asks a project management consultancy to carry out a project review. Here we provide for a checklist of the items to check. Missing checkmarks reveal the reasons why the project is on the path to fail and indicate what needs to be done to fix it.

Companies that are inexperienced with the agile project management philosophy superimpose agile terms such as tribes, sprints, daily syncs, etc. on existing structures in order to claim that they are also working agile now. However, as a result they only achieve the opposite. Instead of becoming more agile they have generated more chaos.

Using a KANBAN board in a project does not turn the project into an agile KANBAN project. The KANBAN project management methodology actually requires much more.