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Often, project managers don’t add resources to their project schedules. If you don’t do a lot of resource reporting from your scheduling tool, it can seem like overkill to add people’s names to the tasks. It’s another step to do and you’re already busy enough.

When you’re independently consulting as a project manager or other type of project team resource, one of the most frightening terms is ‘downtime’.  Or, equally bad…’non-billable hours’. In this economy, both of those terms can strike fear even into the most confident consultant.

Rolling out a new solution for a project client requires extreme planning, effort, and coordination throughout the engagement. No project manager or project team member would tell you anything different.

Deadlines are part of every project.  There will be easy deadlines, difficult deadlines, and probably even some ‘never-going-to-make-it’ deadlines on your projects imposed either by you, your customer, executive management, or just circumstances way outside of your control.  The key is to not let deadlines eat you and your team alive and keep them in perspective.

You can get everything from apps dedicated to task lists to collaboration tools, to tools that calculate project risk and model outcomes for you. Here is my list of top 9 essential tools for project managers, the things that I believe you can't do without.

Phew! The project you just finished is over and now you can breathe a sigh of relief, and you. While most project managers are usually eager to begin the next project, there are still some outstanding steps to take on closing out your previous project before beginning the next one. Properly closing out all projects after completion is ensuring correct project management.

Programme Manager (or Program Manager, if you’re on the other side of the pond to me), is the key person for “setting up of the programme through to delivery of the new capabilities and realisation of benefits,” according to the MSP guide.  That’s a lot of responsibility.  But what does it actually involve?

Have you ever been a member of a high-performing, smoothly running team? If you have been, it’s an experience that you are not likely to forget. On this type of team there is usually a strong trust bond, people work cooperatively together to reach the common project goals, and often the project is even more successful than the project manager and customer could have imagined. These types of teams generally have some key characteristics in common that help make them the effective, high-performing teams that they are. 

Teams featuring these twelve characteristics often have little hope of success, especially if the conditions persist for any length of time. The proactive project manager must recognize these conditions and take corrective action as quickly as possible.