Category: Project Management Skills
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15 Point Forum – No 16 : Task Management
There are many ways to manage tasks as a project manager but it has to be right for the project being delivered, the methodology used and the stakeholders. Some important points below • Set up the communications plan to suit the project, the methodology and the stakeholders. • Agile & lean deliveries that have quick
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15 Point Forum – No 15 : Different names for Project Managers
The project management profession can be confusing and one of the main reasons is that the job of Project Manager can be and is called many different things. Unlike other professions where titles are more streamlined like Accounting (Financial, Management, Forensic Accountants etc), Project Management has become unnecessarily complicated and organisations do take liberties with
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15 Point Forum – No 14: The Importance of the Business Stand-up
In every project delivery communication plans are critical to manage stakeholders and stakeholder communications. An essential part of a communication plan is the Business Stand Up. See points below why this particular meeting is so important. • It is short and crisp with a duration of 15 minutes and gets the important updates and issues
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15 Point Forum – No 13: How to get the best out of your project manager.
Project managers believe it or not are good at managing, the giveaway is in their job title. Make their roles easier by embracing what they do and having the right structures in place to make them succeed. Remember if they succeed so do you, your business, your project, your program, your implementation, it is a
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15 Point Forum – No 11: Understanding Scope Management
I’ve been a project & program manager for years and one of the areas I find non project management professionals and some project management professionals have difficulty with is understanding and managing scope. Some points to note below • Scope management is completely different to requirements management. • Scope can be broken down into product
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15 Point Forum – No 10: Managing Disruptive Stakeholders
Every project delivery will contain difficult stakeholders that have to be managed in a firm and polite way so not to disrupt the natural flow of the project. Disruptive stakeholders can cause problems and can demand more attention than others but as a project manager the important skill needed is to balance the needs of
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15 Point Forum – No 9: Effective Project Meetings
The one area where i consistently find poor management is in the running of meetings. For effective and efficient meetings project managers need to take control and keep them entirely project focused. Some tips below. • No meeting needs to be longer than 30 minutes unless the agenda and complexity of the content necessitate it.
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15 Point Forum – No 8: The Accidental Project Manager
The project management field and discipline has expanded and grown quickly over the last ten years but with that comes the concept of ‘The Accidental Project Manager’, a project manager who doesn’t have the necessary skill set and knowledge to perform the duties of the role, who isn’t really a project manager at all but
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15 Point Forum – No 7: The Day to Day Project Manager
• Project Managers do not just sit at their desks dictating tasks to stakeholders. • Project Managers manage multiple projects simultaneously. • Project Managers skill sets are transferable from industry to industry – prospective employers please take note. • Project Managers never switch off. • Project Managers who think they have downtime always feel like they
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15 Point Forum – No 6: How to deal with chaos in projects
All projects will run into chaos at some point but it’s not the problem it’s the solution that is key. But if you manage projects effectively and efficiently at the start and plan properly then you can avoid and alleviate damaging levels of project chaos. Some helpful tips below • Trust your project management skills
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15 Points Forum – No 5: How to make project delivery simple
• Have an engaged project sponsor who knows the duties of the role. • Resource project teams properly. • Structure your project to be a success & Learn from past failures. • Don’t try to fit square pegs in round holes, procure and implement systems that fit your business needs. • Fit your project to
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15 Points Forum – No 4: What is Project Management
• Project management is about planning for future events. • Project management is about vendor and client delivery. • Project management is not just an actions management and note taking exercise. • Project management is about managing all stakeholders not just the ones with important titles and treating all project stakeholders with the same amount
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15 Points Forum – No 3: Text book vs Real life Project Management
• Professional project management qualifications can be very structured and not replicate real life scenarios. • Academic qualifications such as degrees and masters are good as knowledge learned can be empirically based but again these don’t replicate real life scenarios. • The ideal state for a project manager is having a bit of everything, so
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15 Points Forum – No 2: Future of Project Management
• Project Management will become more agile driven, more collaborate and more client and customer centred. • Artificial Intelligence will become more prevalent in the future but it will not render project managers obsolete. • Artificial Intelligence will help with reporting tasks, actions, administration and note taking. • The project management field will grow and
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15 Points Forum – No 1: Myths of Project Management
• Project Managers are 100% technical. • Project Managers are personal assistants (PAs). • Project Managers will fix all your problems. • Project Managers can control the uncontrollable. • Project Managers are kings of multi-tasking. • Project Managers should be held solely responsible for project failures. • Project Managers should be held solely responsible for
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 23 : Timeline & Milestone Management
Timelines & Milestones are integral parts of project management. These are the events in a project that senior management look at & focus on and whilst they are high level in nature, optically they are high in importance. However it is the tasks and work completed behind them that are key to project delivery. Some
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 22 : Bottleneck Management
I once reported into a head of project management who believed projects should not have any risks and issues attached to them. I am not sure where that school of thought came from, if it was just a lack of experience or just pure naivety but what I do know is it was a complete
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 21 : Ability to Double & Triple Job.
Depending on where you work or have worked there is a good chance you have worked in a project delivery structure that has necessitated an ability for you as a project manager to either double, triple or even quadruple job. The common jobs that get meshed in with project management responsibilities are business analysis, change
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 20 : Escalation Management
Escalation management is critical in all projects. You may hear senior stakeholders saying I don’t want any surprises but surprises happen, project managers are skilled professionals but they can’t predict the future. Risks turn to issues and problem solving, troubleshooting, bottleneck and impasse management are all part and parcel of day to day project management.
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 19 : Phase Management – Part 2
Phase 5 – Build & Development – The build phase of the project is the one phase whereby the project manager has little involvement in – At this stage the project manager should make sure the requirements & design phases are completed and in order – The build team will carry out a review of the
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 18 : Phase Management – Part 1
No matter what methodology you use to deliver a project managing the flow of each phase, the transition, exit and entry of phases is an essential skill project managers must be adept at. In the more structured waterfall methodology formal quality gates (also known as tollgates) may need to passed in order for the transition
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 17 : Contract Management
When working as a Project Manager in a client / vendor project delivery invariably there will always be a signed contract between the parties outlining what will be delivered, the agreed scope, proposed timelines, propped methodology and an overview of the requirements even if at a high level. Costs, payment schedules and key project stakeholders
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 16 : Good Memory
It may seem obvious but having a good memory is a skill Project Managers should have. Even if you believe as a Project Manager you don’t have a good memory the chances are you do as for most deliverables the number of tasks, meetings and interactions you go through every week is phenomenal. You end
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 15 : Project Kick Off
The project kick off is a key element of the early phase of any deliverable. It can be used as an introduction and meeting point for both vendor and client whether that be an external or internal client. It should take place after the procurement of a system from a vendor and after contracts have
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 14 : Training Type Knowledge
There are many types of training that can be given. Some are noted below and they can be managed solely by designated training managers and / or Project Managers. It is important that training is given on any system deployed if the company wants to derive the best use out of it. End users who
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 13 : Project Sponsor and Project Team Relationship
The project sponsor will be the primary point of escalation in any project. There can be project structures where Project Managers reports into program managers and program managers into portfolio managers, but these structures are few and far between and in the majority cases the project sponsor is your escalation point. The reason for this
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 12 : Virtual & Remote Working
It is fair to say that only 3 years ago I wouldn’t have had this in my top 100 PM skills. But times have changed and whilst some companies always embraced working from home, Covid and the pandemic has forced other companies to adapt and adopt at a minimum a hybrid way of working. For
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 11 : Requirements & Business Analysis
Requirements gathering is in my opinion they most important part of any project. If this phase is mis-managed in any way then the impact on proceeding phases can be catastrophic. The reason for this is that the requirements of any deliverable dictate what will be designed, built, tested and deployed down the line. Many organizations
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 10 : Trust
Trust is an important element in building working relationships with the key stakeholders in a project team. Without trust delivering a successful project becomes very difficult. When a Project Manager first joins an organisation the first couple of weeks are key to building the trust with your project colleagues. You need them to believe you
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 9 : Time Management
Time management is a key skill every Project Manager should have. It seems obvious but one of the criteria a successful Project Manager is judged on is delivering a project within an agreed timeframe. To be able to achieve this an ability to manage time effectively is needed. A high level plan to guide timelines
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A – Z of Project Management : (B) Part 1
B1: BACKLOG A backlog is simply a build-up of unfinished work. Backlogs can affect numerous business units within a business and can be a regular part of discussions in the finance, accounting and administration type roles. When it comes to project delivery, backlogs have the potential to delay phase completion and ultimately scheduled go live
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 8 : Actions Management
The discipline of taking actions and notes is important in project management. However, in my opinion and recent experiences, the advent of agile methodologies and shorter timeframes for deliverables as seen the prevalence of taking actions and notes become less than it has been in the past. Once tracked effectively and managed in a way
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A – Z of Project Management : (A) Part 4
A21: ASSUMPTIONS Assumptions in the project management domain are contained within the RAID log which contains all the Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies for each project. They are normally tracked together, with Risks and Issues given greater weighting within a project. Assumptions should contain anything at the beginning of any given project that can be
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 7 : Change Management
Change management can be the forgotten element when delivering a project. To justify the need for a change manager the project being delivered needs to be part of a wider program, essentially a large program and to add to this the systems being implemented must be replacing old legacy systems that have been in use
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A – Z of Project Management : (A) Part 3
A12: AGILE Agile is a project methodology that is lean by nature and is suited to small and medium software deployments of less than six months. They can be scaled up but this is less common. The agile development itself tends to run for two to three months and is broken down into SPRINTS that
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 6 : Budget and Cost Management
Managing the project budget is not necessarily the responsibility of the Project Manager. In my experience it depends on the project being delivered and the structure of the organisation you work for whether or not you will have full or part responsibility for project costs. If you don’t have to manage the budget then most
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A – Z of Project Management : (A) Part 2
A7: ACTIVITY SEQUENCING When planning out a project, step one will normally be to list down all the tasks you believe are needed to deliver a successful project. Obviously, task lists are completed at a particular point of time and will be what a project manager believes are all the tasks needed. But logic will
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 5 : Scope Management
Depending on the deliverable at hand managing scope can be easy or hard. If there is a signed contract that is well written in understandable language whereby all parties agree on the deliverable then scope management in theory should be easy. If, however, there is no contract or an ambiguous contract, and all parties have
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A – Z of Project Management : (A) Part 1
A1: ABSORPTION RATE For the purposes of Project Management, I will keep the definition simple and not aligned with the technical accounting definition. In projects there will always be costs that cannot be recouped from clients or business units internally. An example can be the easiest way to explain it. If the budget for a
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 4 : Presentation of project data and reports
Whether it be workshops, project kick offs, weekly status reports or steering committee meetings collating data to input into presentations and chairing presentations is an integral part of a Project Managers role. There is no avoiding it so if you are not comfortable with either data collection, presentation creation & presentation giving, then project management
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 3 : Resource Management
If the correct resources are not available or made available to the project team then delivering a successful project is extremely difficult and will be fraught with many issues such as delays and costs increases. Without having the project team resourced adequately the project is beings set up to fail, that is how important it
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 2 : Communication Skills
Building working relationships and rapport with the project stakeholder group involves being able to communicate clearly, concisely and effectively. Treating all members of the project team equally without prejudice is a necessity as all members are valuable contributors to a successful project delivery. Without good communication the project will suffer and any miscommunication or ambiguity
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100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series – No 1 : Effective Listening
My first blog as part of the 100 Core Skills for Project Managers Series focusing on “Effective Listening”, a key soft skill that every project manager should possess. The skills in this series are in no particular order as all skills are important in some way or other. Effective listening is a critical soft skill
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Blog Introduction
My name is David Anthony Malone & I am a Project & Program Manager. Over the last twenty years I have delivered many projects for vendors & clients including large transformation programs, numerous software delivery projects & numerous specific finance based projects in many different industries. For the last while now I’ve been thinking to
my easy projects 