What is Project Control?

The term control has several meanings. Those new to project management are initially dismayed by the use of the term “control,” because they mistakenly equate it with the concept of authority. In the world of project management, control has very little to do with telling people what to do, dictating their actions or thoughts, or trying to force them to behave in a certain way— all of which are common interpretations of control. In project management, the term “control” is much more analogous to steering a ship. It’s about continually making course adjustments with one main objective in mind—bringing the ship into safe harbor, as promised at the start of the voyage. And the successful project voyage includes identifying a specific destination, carefully charting a course to get there, evaluating your location throughout the voyage, and keeping a watchful eye on what lies ahead.

5 Tips For Faster Scheduling

Some PMs find project scheduling to be good fun. It’s exciting to see all those tasks come together into one structured whole. The project appears before your very eyes and suddenly the screen shows a complete initiative, with everything and everyone aligned to deliver a meaningful business benefit. Plus there is something satisfying about sorting out over-allocation for resources and dealing with task conflicts. When the schedule is done, it’s a work of art.

What isn’t fun, is the time it takes to develop that beautiful project schedule. Here are some tricks to help you produce a schedule faster.

1. Work Together

You can’t put the schedule together by yourself although I have tried! That was a long time ago, before I realized the value in having input from others in the project team. Everyone on the team will have a different take on the tasks involved to get the work done, and as they see it from a slightly different angle, with a focus on their own work, they will identify the tasks that they need to do that you wouldn’t be able to see. Input from subject matter experts is invaluable and will save you loads of time going back and forth between team members for information.

You can hold a project scheduling workshop and brainstorm all the tasks together, which is a fast way to get the whole schedule produced in just a couple of days. You could never do it that quickly if you worked alone.

هل يختلف امتداد حياة المشروع عن دورة حياة المشروع؟

خلال هذه التدوينة سوف نقوم بالقاء الضوء على الخلاف الأول في التعريف بين امتداد حياة المشروع Project Life Span ودورة حياة المشروع Project Life Cycle.

1)     تسليط الضوء

 نرجو قراءة النقاط الواردة أدناه, ومحاولة الاجابة على الأسئلة.

1. في مشروع معيّن (ليس مهمة أو مشروع صغير) كيف كنت تقوم بانجاز عمليات البدء بالمشروع بحسب ما ينص عليه كتاب PMBOK®  والتي تقوم باصداره منظمة PMI؟

هل يشترط بمدير المشروع أن يكون مهندساً؟

مقدمة

تأتي هذه المقالة بعد العديد من الآراء والحالات التي تم مشاهدتها في منطقتنا من خلال تواصلنا وعملنا مع العديد من المنظمات في القطاعين العام والخاص، بحيث كان هناك شبه اجماع على ضرورة أن يكون مدير المشروع من حملة شهادة الهندسة. كما وأننا نجد هذه الحالة على مواقع التواصل الاجتماعي حيث تقوم العديد من المنظمات بوضع عروض للعمل وتطلب مدراء مشاريع يحملون شهادة في الهندسة. 

مدى وجود ادارة المشاريع في مناهج دراسة الهندسة

ان مناهج دراسة الهندسة في الجامعات أقله في منطقتنا، لا تتعدى أنها تحتوي على مادة أو مادتين تتعلّق بادارة المشاريع. وان جميع هذه المواد تُعنى بالتخطيط أو بادارة الجدول الزمني للمشروع سواء من خلال استخدام برامج وتطبيقات معينة أو من خلال الشرح النظري لها. فهل من الممكن أن تكون هذه المادتين كافيتين لأي مهندس في ادارة مشروع معيّن؟

How Your Project Management Knowledge Can Increase Your Business Value

Many organizations that are involved in managing  projects fails to capture  the ongoing knowledge  gained from implementing the different project management processes during the project life cycle. They use daily different document templates, workflows, reports and dashboards to manage  their projects that are not formally documented to enable  other projects to make use and benefit from this wasted knowledge.

You can turn this project management knowledge  into an asset that your company can share across all of their projects, current and future.  It is an asset that will reduce your company chances to fail in delivering successful projects.  Your company can document this knowledge in a standard operating procedures manual  to attain  the international certification of ISO

10006:2009 which provides the Guidelines for Quality Management in Projects. A certification

that will differentiate your company from the competition.

FAST TRACK YOUR PROJECT MANAGEMENT

PROCEDURES IN THREE-STEPS USING REVERSE ENGINEERING

Regardless  what project management procedures manual you want to have, we all understand the importance of fulfilling the needs  of what senior stakeholders want to know about projects being executed. They would usually want dashboards that will summarize projects key performance information  to enable  them to take the right decisions and actions. The level of details  of those dashboards do vary and depend  on the role of the stakeholder and how projects could affect they are responsible for. Dashboards  could be at enterprise, business  unit or portfolio, program, project, contract  and even project management process level. Dashboards  enable  stakeholders to analyze performance trends  and identify exceptions that could need their immediate attention.

PMP Training with Saraya Aqaba

Project Managers' Sizes!

At first, a PM to me meant a respectful person, full of experience and knowledge, 

who knows what s/he does and knows that his/her job is to deliver successful projects as much 

as to help people and guide them.

To my surprise “as usual”, I found out that there are different types of PMs in the world… In other words, different sizes of PMs!
Let me introduce to you two project managers’ sizes and my stories with them. Mini PM referred to as Miss Mini and Mighty PM referred to as Mr. Mighty…

Solve Project Puzzles The Sherlock Holmes Way

I was reading Sherlock Holmes the other day – I thought it would be interesting to go back to the original books that I read as a child since the fictional detective seems to be on the television and big screen frequently at the moment. I love detective stories and Sherlock Holmes does seem to be able to unpick some big problems.

His approach to solving cases, whether it’s a murder, a piece of lost jewellery or something a bit more out of the ordinary, is very similar to the approach we take on projects when it comes to diagnosing and resolving issues.

So here is my guide to solving project puzzles, the Sherlock Holmes way.

1. Gather The Facts

The detective always starts off with facts. He meets his client and finds out exactly what has happened. More often than not he will go to the scene of the crime to investigate in person – in other words, going back to the root cause of the issue and assessing the situation based on what he has uncovered personally instead of listening to a third party report the problem to him.

Project Schedules, Hamster Wheels, and Your Team's Hidden Superpower

7 inShare Andrew Filev  "Failing to plan is planning to fail," - some sources attribute this saying to Winston Churchill, while  others refer to Benjamin Franklin, or Alan Lakein, author on time management. Whoever the  author really was, his succinct wisdom could help many project managers avoid costly mistakes.  It seems that there are many project teams who suffer from inaccurate plans and their consequences.  In fact, this challenge ranked as no.3 in the list of the biggest productivity killers, according to our  recent survey. In this post, I'll observe some ways to keep your team safe from this threat and make  sure your project's timeline is accurate.

How can CAPM certificate from PMI help you get ahead

Watch this video from PMI to understand the value of CAPM certificate & why YOU should have it.

4 Ways To Refresh Your PM Career In One Hour

Stress is a fact of the project management world. The responsibility to deliver projects, week after week, gradually wears you down. On a Friday morning, you finally deliver a major project.
Before you can even start to unwind, someone asks you to join another project. Suddenly, the sweet experience of a well delivered project fades to a vague memory.

To break out of this punishing cycle, you need tools to refresh your career. These tools give you new perspectives on your work. These concepts will improve your professional network, help you understand your accomplishments and identify new opportunities. For best results, put all of these into practice over a period of weeks (some of them can be used daily!)

1. Go For A Long Walk To A New Area (30-60 minutes)

New environments have a big impact. So many people think they have to get on a plane and visit a new country in order to experience something new. International travel is fantastic but don’t limit yourself to that. After all, you may have limited money and vacation days.

بعض الأفكار والأساطير في ادارة المشاريع

حيث أننا نعمل في مجال ادارة المشاريع ونسافر في جميع أنحاء العالم لتقديم التدريب أو الاستشارة في هذا المجال، ونلتقي العديد من العملاء بالاضافة الى مشاهدتنا لبعض التعليقات التي يضعها بعض الأشخاص على صفحات التواصل الاجتماعي، فقد وجدنا أن هناك بعض المفاهيم الخاطئة في هذا المجال بالاضافة الى المبالغات أحياناً والتي قد تصل لى حد الأساطير… واليكم بعضها:

الأسطورة الأولى

انها احدى الأمور الأساسية التي واجهناها على مواقع التواصل الاجتماعي في منطقتنا. وبحيث يعتبر البعض أن شهادة PMP® هي نفسها ادارة المشاريع. وفي بعض الحالات هناك بعض المنظمات التي تطلب بدورها تدريب على شهادة PMP® معتبرين أنهم يقومون بذلك بتدريب موظفيهم على ادارة المشاريع.

10 Places To Find Project Management Advice

Everyone needs help at some point in their careers, and even experienced project managers know that they need reliable places to go to find advice when they hit problems. So where should you start? Here are 10 sources of project management advice that you can tap into when you need some guidance.

1. Your Manager

The first place to go for advice is your manager. You should have regular one-to-one meetings with him or her and you should feel comfortable enough to ask their opinion or advice on any sort of query from how to use project software to the best ways to manage risk. Your manager will also have a wide professional network, so if they can’t help they probably know someone who can. Ask them to suggest someone who may have the expertise that you are looking for and to make an introduction for you.

2. Your Mentor

If you can’t speak to your manager (or don’t want to), then your mentor is another person you can turn to for advice. Many companies have formal and informal mentoring schemes so sign up to this if it is available. You could also look outside your company for a mentor, perhaps through your local PMI Chapter or another industry group. Mentors are another group who are likely to have good connections so if they can’t help directly they can point you in the direction of an individual or resource that can.

Introduction to Project Management

 Get the PDF Version

By Duncan Haughey, PMP

Project management in the modern sense began in the early 1950s, although it has its roots further back in the latter years of the 19th century. The driver for project management was businesses realising the benefits of organising work around projects and the critical need to communicate and co-ordinate work across departments and professions.

Many organisations don't employ full-time project managers and it is common to pull together a project team to meet a specific need. While many people may not have formal skills in a project methodology, taking a role in a project team is an excellent learning opportunity and can improve a person's career profile.

Here is the main definition of what project management is:

• Project management is no small task.
• Project management has a definite beginning and end. It is not a continuous process.
• Project management uses various tools to measure accomplishments and track project tasks. These include Work Breakdown Structures, Gantt charts and PERT charts.
• Projects frequently need resources on an ad-hoc basis as opposed to organisations that have only dedicated full-time positions.
• Project management reduces risk and increases the chance of success.