Managing Documents of a Project

While we all understand the importance of a very good Project Management Solution to be able to manage our project effectively. Various documents that we come across during the project, plays major role in success or failure of the project. While checking the correctness of the document is out of scope of this article, here, I am explaining the set of features that you can use to manage your documents most effectively.

Project Management Concepts

Purpose of this article is to list out all the possible terms in project management so that interested reader can dig further into this and gain complete knowledge about the project management.

Managing Scope Changes

Biggest reason for overrun of schedule as well as budget is change in agreed scope. It is important to identify them and handle them formally. Even if you want to provide add on services to your customer and you may like to accommodate the changes free of cost, you must make this explicit. Going through formal change control board gives you opportunity to review your budget and schedule and at the same time client also understands that the new changes will be scrutinized before it can be included in the project scope. This article talks about various types of scope changes and how to manage them.

Building the environment of Commitment

So far I have been talking about theory and planning. However, it doesn’t really matter how good plan you have unless you implement them effectively. In this article I am talking about what does it take to execute your plan effectively.

Project Estimation

Wherever cost is involved and price is not published or well known (as you may see in case of commodity), often you need to take help of estimation. In other industry – for example acoustics, trading, and constructions you take help of quotation to indicate the price of your service and products to your customer. Depending on product attributes and type of service you can define your pricing strategy, which allows you to provide quotes relatively easily. However, in case of IT, the estimation becomes relatively tricky. People across the industry have been doing this for over 50 years and still there is always questions raised on estimates. In this article I am focusing on the aspects that we must consider while coming up with an estimate.

Project activity management

So far we have been talking about different aspects of project and project management, which was primarily focused on bringing in enough clarity about the scope, people involved, risks, assumptions, constraints, methodology and process to ensure that we have done what we intended to do. While all those things are extremely important, what is even more important to use that information / resource as an input and deliver the project on time and within budget. That is where we must come up with unambiguous and precise project execution and implementation plan. This article talks about how to create and manage such schedule.

Assumptions Vs Constraint

As we have been talking again and again, there are very few project which begins with absolute clarity. At least I haven’t been involved in any such projects. We have already talked about risks and how to manage risks. However, two more important things you need to understand are Assumptions and Constraints. In this article I have defined them and explained what can be categorized as assumptions and what should be called constraints and how to handle them.

Defining and Managing Risks of a Project

As an experienced analyst or manager – we all know that it will be rarity to expect absolute clarity on each and everything involved in the project. With that knowledge – when we proceed with the project planning and execution, we cannot afford to sleep over the gaps. Whatever clarity we don’t have must be treated as a risk and we should always keep looking for right time and opportunity to take care of that risk. If we can take care of risk properly, often all the parties will be happy otherwise, they will keep popping as issues (sometimes devastating issues) now and then. In this article I am talking about what is risk and how to manage them effectively.

Project Management Checklists

Checklists keep us reminding about things that needs to be done – before we can call something as completed. Similarly, Project Management checklists ensure that we are not missing anything while we are progressing during the project execution. Remember – if we miss anything – it will enforce us to repeat many steps again. This article provides you a consolidated list, which will be handy during any project execution.

Calculating Cost of Project

While it is important to do Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) to be able to achieve best possible result during project, calculating cost correctly plays a big role. In this article I have tried to cover most of the aspects which has impact on cost of a project. Although, this list is exhaustive, you may need to modify it to meet your custom needs.