Dear Elizabeth: I’m project managing 100 projects (seriously), and struggling. The main thing is deadlines – we have a fixed project deadline, but it’s largely in the control of our customers as we require information/feedback from them during the project. How can I set a deadline so that I can see the original due date…

Let’s say you are going to a friend’s house, and you expect it to take about an hour to get there. In your city; however, traffic is known to cause delays. If a traffic jam occurs, it will impact your arrival time. You’ve informed your friend about the possibility of delay—say by 20 to 30…

Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs): This Webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDUs in the Technical category of the Talent Triangle. Event Description: Project Online provides many powerful reporting tools and is a treasure trove of information. However, many organizations have other data sources that affect or otherwise influence the data from…

I enjoy the occasional list about why I should use a certain tool or why it might make my life a bit easier. Power BI is one of those tools that definitely makes reporting easier from Project. As such, a list of Power BI’s advantages could be quite a long list, but the longer list,…

Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs): This Webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDUs in the Leadership category of the Talent Triangle. Event Description: Think managing up is just brown-nosing in disguise? Think again. Managing up in projects done well will bring clarity, commitment, ownership, and support your project needs to meet time…

Over the past decade or so, the concept of ‘cloud’ has become synonymous with a place where we store all things work-related (such as documents and data). In many cases, a ‘cloud’ represents the place where we work (i.e. within a digital workspace like SharePoint or Wrike). For project managers, we often speak in fluffy…

Microsoft Project is a powerful project management tool. That’s what it is – a tool. Its dashboards and views are an agent for successful status communication, but the highlighted information is only as good as the accuracy of the user’s data. What type of information is important to ensure an accurate project status? Where do…

At my company, we are advocates of collaborative project management. That is, empowering everyone on your team to lead and contribute to the success of a project. There is no better tool for collaborative project management than Microsoft SharePoint! Managing a project in SharePoint centralizes all project information in one collaborative project site. Combine that…

Dear Elizabeth: I work on a project team for a manufacturing company. For the last year, we’ve been using ranged estimates to build out our schedules. For the most part, our customers love it. We have one customer who is putting up a fight, saying they want a hard deadline. How do we convince them…

It is important to keep your project team focused on current and near-term tasks. If you want to send out a weekly update to your project team, showing which tasks are active, but incomplete, or scheduled to start in the next week, it would help to have a flag that automatically identifies those tasks for…