When we think about measuring the performance of a project, it’s not really the same as measuring the performance of a team or a process. So we need to think a little differently about the kinds of measures that will tell us what we really need to know. When we measure the performance of the…

Certificate Series Directory Project Portfolio Management Driving project performance is not only about “doing projects right” it is about “doing the right projects”. Yet doing the right projects is more than simply individual project selection, rather it is about how the organization manages the entire mix of the business’s portfolio of projects. It is about…

Complex projects go bad weekly. During the first week of January 2011, these stories made headlines: A light rail project near Detroit is held up by project delays caused by federal environmental requirements; Indonesia’s state banks fail to meet infrastructure loan projects because of project delays due to land acquisition challenges; a regional board of…

How often have you been involved in a project where the customer and the project team didn’t seem to share the same understanding of the project definition? Frequently, what the project manager sees as newly revealed requirements tend to be viewed by the customer as requirements that should have been obvious from the beginning. In…

Far too often people arbitrarily track project performance through the “Percent (%) Complete” method with subjective estimates for “how finished” the project is. Microsoft Project doesn’t work well with this since manually entering values into the % complete field logically cascades a cavalcade of calculations, which aren’t necessarily intuitive. The % complete or % work…