Keep Your Eye on the Overall Project Management Promises

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By S. Maurer

A Project Management Rule: Keep your eye on the overall project promises. Project work can be difficult. It is easy to loose sight of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Remind your team and yourself of the overall promises and how you are doing fulfilling those promises.

The core variables of the project management process, namely: product scope, quality grade, time-to-produce and total cost-at-completion must all be mutually consistent and attainable.

Are we using project management as a data repository for tasks or are we using it as our monitoring and control tool? Hopefully, project managers are using their project management for both.

Large corporations such as insurance companies and banks may also hire PMs to manage the implementation of new standards or practices in their many branch offices. Internet companies often look for project managers to oversee site launches or the development of new applications.

It is concerning that “poor project management” is often given as the “excuse” for project failure. Similarly, Poor Resource and Cost Management are a direct result of mismanagement of our organization’s assets, often resulting in poor project performance, cost and schedule overruns, and even catastrophic project failures.