Don’t mistake project reports for communication

While many project communication plans are simply a schedule for the distribution of project reports, sending out information has very little to do with effective communication. Lynda Bourne outlines the difference between project reports and effective communication.

Is there fame in project management?

What are you famous for? Perhaps you’re being honoured for your ability to change the world for the better with your savvy project management skills and finesse? Michelle LaBrosse on how to get noticed for your project management skills.

Wrapping PRINCE2 around Agile

Rapid changes in the business world has seen the emergence of Agile as a project management methodology, while PRINCE2 is becoming the world standard for practising project management. Roger Fance considers how these two can be combined.

Juggling client expectations and internal ROI—Dean Lewis

Juggling client expectations and internal ROI
All businesses strive to manage their resources as efficiently as possible. But for a professional services firm where skilled staff such as project and engineering consultants represent both their biggest cost and biggest source of revenue, effective resource management is critical to creating client value, enhancing profitability and maintaining a competitive edge.

Clients want to know that their investment will improve their business, whether by lowering costs, enabling efficiencies or expansion into new markets. They also need assurance that a project will complete on time, on budget and within the agreed parameters. If a deliverable does look likely to slip, then they expect to be informed as early as possible.

As such, professional services firms need complete visibility across their business. Projects must be planned, resourced and executed in a way that allows a firm to find the right combination of team members and skill-sets to maximise billable hours at lowest cost and achieve the best possible margin.

They also need to be able to bid for contracts safe in the knowledge that they have the headroom to deliver on what they have set out within the tender. This is particularly challenging in the current economic climate, where headcounts have been reduced and recruitment programs frozen. The more prospective projects there are in the pipeline, the greater the risk that resources will be overstretched.

Author: Dean Lewis
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Brookfield Multiplex completes UNSW project

Construction company Brookfield Multiplex has completed the Tyree Energy Technologies Building at Sydney’s University of New South Wales (UNSW), which combines leading edge research facilities alongside a teaching space.

Project schedules: the good, the bad, and the pretty

What makes for a quality project schedule? Martin Vaughan sifts through the good, the bad and the ‘pretty and colourful’ to find the perfect balance, and laments the lost art of project scheduling.

The myth of flexibility: people, projects, prostration

Dedicated project managers bend over backwards to serve the project, their sponsors and stakeholders but are rarely flexible when it comes to meeting their own needs.

6 reasons to stop funding a project

When considering a request for additional funding there are three types of funds: sunk funds, the ‘money at risk’ (to be spent in the next phase) and the remaining projected cost of the project. But when should you stop funding altogether?