PMEducation

Planning: Setting a course of action to achieve a desired Goal. Your 'Plan' is that course of action "Plan your work and work your plan" is an adage we have all heard. How about "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail"? So if planning is that important to successful project management, what are the key elements of effective planning? An effective plan paves the way to a successful outcome. With an effective plan you will have a reference against which to measure progress. Pr

At some point of time in your project you will need to acquire something from an organization outside of your project team. To acquire such goods and/or services requires the group of Activities called Procurement. You might need to acquire the use of office space. You might need materials for assembly. Perhaps you need to acquire a labour force. All of these are procurements. Goods and/or services used in creating the project deliverables are called "direct" procurements and

If you have been following the project steps, as sequenced on this website, you have already Planned: Stakeholder Engagement, Scope, Time, Cost, Quality, HR, Physical Resources, Communications, and Procurement. You and your Project Team have worked very hard to ensure you have a great plan. You want no surprises and a minimum of frustrations to accompany your project. "What can possibly go wrong?" Good question! and that is exactly what you need to ask, so you can manage the

Do you manage a few large projects? Do you manage several smaller projects? What is the best approach for these 2 scenarios? MANAGING LARGE PROJECTS In Planning Scope, Step 3, we saw how a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is used to take a complex deliverable and decompose it into Work Packages and further into Activities for easier management. In planning Time, we saw how a Time plan begins with decomposing the WBS work packages into Activities. The Time plan is a completed C