Decisions and uncertainties abound in life. Take something as simple as deciding where to go for a short vacation. Do you go to a nearby mountain because your friends like it or to a faraway beach because you like it? The option of staying near the beach may be cheaper but would require a longer…

Early in my career I was assigned a project that had been running for almost a year, but had never seen a single live release to the customer. On my first day, I was informed, “Welcome aboard! But you are already 20 days late! You have to deliver a release in the next 30 days!”…

Let’s say you were to meet gold medal sprinter Usain Bolt and say to him, “Here’s a great track in front of you. You run. We’ll monitor your running and declare you the fastest!” Would he run? His response would probably be, “Run against what?” If you said, “Just run, man! Don’t worry about the…

Imagine this situation: You have food items in your refrigerator. Some of them are running out. You figure out what items you need — when and in what quantity — and put sticky notes on the door of the refrigerator. Let’s call those “withdrawal cards.” As one of the items is running out, you pull…

An oft repeated management quote goes like this: “Planning is indispensable, but plans are useless.” Whether you like it or not, planning is essential. Without planning, there’s no horizon to look at and no way to know at what point in time deliverables will be given. However, anyone can tell you this: It rarely happens…

As of January 12, 2016 the Project Management Professional (PMP)® exam has been revised. A new area of focus is business strategy and strategic alignment of projects. PMI® has conducted extensive research on the topic in recent years and the news isn’t good: Poor performance results in organizations wasting an average of US$109 million for…

Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is a project selection technique that takes a comparative approach for selection. When you’re taking the PMI® PMP® exam, you should expect questions on IRR. In your day-to-day life as well you can check with IRR to help make better decisions, such as whether to buy insurance. Hence, IRR is…

  Starting with its Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®) 5th Edition, PMI® introduced resource smoothing as a resource optimization technique in the time management knowledge area. In earlier additions of PMBOK only resource leveling was available. A number of misconceptions exist with respect to resource leveling and resource smoothing:   Resource…

As you’re preparing for your PMI PMP exam, you’ll want to understand the basics of qualitative risk analysis (QLRA) and quantitative risk analysis (QTRA), both processes that are part of the “Project Risk Management” knowledge area. While these two concepts sound similar and both use numbers in risk rating, they’re not the same at all….

In PMI®’s Project Management Professional (PMP)® exam, you’ll find a number of questions on earned value management (EVM). Along with EVM, the concept of “forecasting” is also important to understand. Forecasting has been used as one of the tools and techniques in the “control costs” process under the “project cost management” knowledge area. If you’re…