“Success Has A Thousand Fathers But Failure Is An Orphan."

This article is a continuation of the series on why projects fail. Poor Coordination Of Effort Companies always try to save costs on projects by not going full bore on a project management group. They may have project managers but they are expected to work within a procurement and accounting system set up for buying toilet paper, selling widgets and delaying payments. When you, as a project manager, are in this type of system, your primary goal is to get the project up and running within budget and on schedule while the other players are interested in keeping the facility... Read More»

Why Do Projects Fail This article is a continuation of why projects fail. Inadequate attention to quality. I have seen quality problems arise from a corporations desire to embrace Auotcad by getting rid of experienced designers and hiring inexperienced CAD operators, to companies suffering because they didn’t get involved in a total quality package. Over my work history I have seen Vendors change from a lack of interest in equipment foundations to being very interested. One project I worked on were four pulp refiners. These were large revolving discs, of several tons, attached to a 10000 hp motor. In the... Read More»

Are Your Metrics Meaningless?

Data is an essential corporate asset, critical for the continued success of any business. Data empowers organizations to make critical decisions and drives strategy. Thus, organizations often enthusiastically collect and report a variety and abundance of data, with the mindset that more is better. However, if not managed effectively, this mass of data may not provide enough meaningful or measurable value and may actually produce misleading conclusions. When implementing a system of metric collection and reporting, there are potential roadblocks that can derail the entire process, leading to meaningless metrics. A common cause of error is an inadequate data collection... Read More»

Is It The Triple Constraints or Quadruple Constraints?

If you are working in project management you have probably heard of the Project Management Triangle or the Triple Constraints. The constraints being scope, schedule, and budget. When managing the project, if one changes we have to look at the other two and see if they change as well. If they have changed then we have to perform some type of control to get the project back in line. My career has been in industry and I am used to the Quadruple or Four Constraints which is more applicable. The four constraints are Scope, Schedule, Budget, and Resources (SSBR) as... Read More»

He Know's What He's Doing!

At a recent workshop I was going over the Work Breakdown Structure and the need break the scope down into more manageable packages. One of the attendees had a question about one of his projects. He was managing a small project that was upgrading some instrumentation at four separate locations. The design work was supposed to be the same at all four locations. When he got the project it was bundled into one package. The question was, since the work was the same, it did not appear to be any big deal to have one package so, was it necessary... Read More»

Location, Location, Location

No, I am not talking about real estate, I’m referring to location of the project when it comes to project estimating. I was assembling an estimating module for one of my workshops and got into the factors used in estimating. This article will be about some of the factors we use and why. On a day to day basis we use factors for labour productivity. We also take a labour rate from one area and use a factor to get a rate for another area. For conceptual estimates, we may want to evaluate a project by comparing the installed cost... Read More»

Portfolio Management: Lamborghini Body on a Plymouth Horizon Chassis

Having attempted rolling out project portfolio management at several organizations I can state with confidence that the portfolio management process fails to deliver on its promise to streamline an organization’s project pipeline and provide high value. However, it is not the fault of the portfolio management process. Rather, I have found that the fault resides primarily with how organizations are structured (refer to a prior blog post titled Portfolio Management: Is Modern Management Practice Compatible?). Another major issue is a lack of education and understanding of portfolio, program, and project management at the upper management level (think C-suite). It’s easy... Read More»

Is This A Project Managers’ Favorite Task?

You know what task I’m talking about. Your project is up and running, you’re moving on to another project, gearing up, getting organized, motivated, excited about the new project, just can’t wait to get going, when the boss says, “Oh, by the way”. These are words no project manager wants to hear, but I digress. The boss comes in and says, “Oh, by the way, don’t forget, you have to close out your last project”. Talk about being deflated. Project closeout is the least enjoyable project task there is. It is boring, you’re not motivated, the other team members are... Read More»

7 Things a Project Manager Should NOT Be Doing

There is no shortage of information on the activity, processes, and tasks that project managers should be performing. It is more difficult to find information on those activities project managers should not be doing. Add value by NOT doing these 7 things. Read More»

Do You Always Under Estimate Your Projects?

I got a request the other day looking for someone to do a workshop on estimating. Some engineers were interested in what projects really cost and how are these costs developed. It sounded like they were doing the estimating and were always wrong. If you do not understand what goes into an estimate and the process involved you will always end up with a poor estimate. In this article I want to give them, and you, the detail that goes into an total installed cost (TIC) estimate for a complex project (multi-disciplined project). This is an estimate that covers the... Read More»