Managing 30 – Project Manager – Australia's online resource for project management professionals

Surviving project change

A significant organisational change event such as a merger, acquisition or change in CEO can have a dramatic impact on existing business projects, especially those tagged ‘discretionary spend’. These types of changes present numerous professional and personal challenges to the project manager.

April 29, 2011

How to work with a change manager on a project

The project manager’s job is to deliver the solution and the change manager’s job is to prepare people to receive the solution. One of the challenges is always that positioning. In my experience, the only time it works is when the change manager has equal influence to the project manager. They do two ends of the same job.

April 21, 2011

Change

Risk and interdependency in programs

An examination of how interdependencies between projects lead to risks that are particular to programs, and a proposal on how to manage these.

April 21, 2011

Alliancing benefits and challenges in infrastructure projects

Alliance contracting offers an unprecedented way to create a strong synergy between partners to deliver a project too complex for traditional ‘hard dollar’ procurement and delivery methods. It brings together several organisations including the client, such as a government infrastructure agency or utility; and non-owner participants such as a civil engineering firm and a constructor, as well as technical specialists as required.

March 31, 2011

The cost of ignoring risk

Having followed the saga of the doomed insulation program, which culminated in the stepping down of Peter Garrett as Minister for the Environment, I couldn’t help but wonder, did the Opposition Leader and the media ask the right questions? The debate that dominated the media and the political landscape centred on whether or not the […]

March 25, 2011

Risk

The changing face of portfolio management

Change is here to stay. Not so long ago, the accepted wisdom was that organisations would introduce change, stop and consolidate, then gear up to change again. Change was a disruption to normal. Today, organisations are in a state of constant change or “permanent whitewater” as leadership development expert Peter Vaille termed it. Today, ‘normal’ […]

March 24, 2011

Disaster management for project managers

Disasters, emergencies, crises—call them what you will, but there’s no doubt adverse situations need their own special treatment. If you think a disaster situation would be the perfect fit for a project manager looking for the thrill of a high pressure role, perhaps it would be wise to take a look at what disaster management […]

March 17, 2011

Project management education, more than training

During a regular catch up, the executive sponsor and the PMO manager were discussing ways to get more improvements in project delivery capability. “I think better education across the company of how projects deliver on strategy will have a significant impact,” said the PMO manager. “Well, we’ve put a lot of your staff through project […]

March 17, 2011

Why IT Projects Fail

It is true that IT projects have a phenomenal rate of failure? An examination of what makes IT projects prone to failure and what good project managers can do.

March 16, 2011