Project Management Techniques

Watch the video of a PM and 5 team members planning a project and spot the PM's mistakes. See the PM deal with each team member's assignment and cope with the sponsor "sticking his head in." Then listen to private interviews and hear what the team members really thought about the planning meeting and listen to their level of commitment to their estimates. The listen to Dick Billows' analysis of the PM's work.

Article & Video: Visual Status Reports=Fast Understanding - In status meetings, we need a visual tool to quickly communicate status data, even to people who are new to projects.

When a project team is commitment to their estimates, it significantly increases the odds of finishing on time. The 3-point technique for estimating helps you get that commitment with a proven team process and also gives you more accurate numbers for scheduling.

Change control is critical to finishing on time and within budget

Dysfunctional project teams can cause major overruns and project duration and budget. There are techniques that project managers can you to salvage dysfunctional project team and turned into a high performing project team

Trying to fight every change to a project doesn't work. Even if the customer doesn't ram the change down your throat, they are still unhappy with the project and with you. Watch a video of a project manager trying to fight a change and failing. Then see him handle the change correctly, with narration by Dick Billows, PMP, CEO of 4PM.com

Video Project Manager in Action: Watch a project manager start planning, get eaten alive by a tough executive and start work with no defined scope. Then see the PM try it again, using best planning practices, and win the day with a crystal clear scope definition. With analysis of the PM's performance by Dick Billows, PMP

Our project managers have fun in a comedy video about PMs and team members preparing for a big project status meeting. See micro-managing PMs frantically hiding problems, team members pointing fingers at each others, sleazy execs maneuvering for political advantage, IT staff with a million BS excuses and HR people back-stabbing Sales to avoid blame. See all the things NOT to do.

The hardest part of the whole risk management process is getting the sponsor or the customer to invest a little effort in avoiding risks. A bit of simple risk analysis can give you some ammunition to persuade the sponsor/customer that on this project we might want to try and avoid some risks rather than letting all of them smack us in the face.

Much of our success in risk management comes from the accuracy of the risk identification. So avoid endless fighting fires and workarounds by spending some time in brainstorming sessions with the client and creative staff.

How we report to the project sponsor is a key to maintaining credibility and securing support for corrective action when we have variances

Best practices planning can overcome a bad executive and weak organizational processes. Follow these templates &, techniques from the first meeting and an approved plan & schedule.

We have to be prepared to deal with changes to the project baselines for scope, budget and duration. This article addresses changes to the baselines that come from the project executive, project team or simply performance related events. The article's video describes the process project managers should go through to set themselves up for effective change control. If we don't think about change control until the executive says, "I want to reduce the duration by two weeks," we're likely to handle it poorly. The bad result is that the executive cuts two weeks from the duration without agreeing to any compensating adjustments to resources or budget. The article and video discuss how we create the proper change control expectations from the beginning of the project which makes it much easier to handle changes when they inevitably arise.

Responding to Project Risks - Project managers respond to risks using one or more of the following strategies: avoidance, mitigation, deflection or as a last resort acceptance with a contingency plan.

Coming up with good estimates is a challenge for all project managers. We give you the 4 different estimating techniques in the article and the video shows you how to present the estimates to the sponsor.