Wrestling with the Project Management Triple Constraint

On this page: In this era of cost cutting and tight regulation, many a Project Management Professional (PMP)® must yearn for the good old days, when flagship projects were commissioned by absolute monarchs, who had unlimited resources to throw at their ventures. If you are preparing for your PMP® exam, you too might fancy an environment where […]

Project Management on the River Kwai

The first management course I was sent on involved watching a war film and playing with Lego bricks. The film, starring Gregory Peck, was put forward as an example of excellent people management. Recently I saw a rerun of another Second World War movie, David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai, and I wondered what […]

The Technique for Rolling Wave Planning in Projects

Planning can be a very frustrating task for a Project Manager. We are often asked to provide detailed estimates based on a set of activities that are not clearly defined. The Project Management Institute recommends a technique called Rolling Wave Planning which seems to apply in these situations. According to the Guide to the Project […]

Project Management: Coping with Culture

Not so long ago, project managers working in Irish small or medium-sized enterprises worked with teams that were exclusively Irish. In other words, the people you dealt with all shared the same culture. When doing their PMP® training, those project managers found the Manage Project Team process easy – just keep abreast of how all the […]

Dealing with Problem People (Part 3)

Anyone who has undergone PMP® training will recall that 75% to 90% of a project manager’s time is spent communicating. That means dealing with stakeholders and the project team. As we have seen in Part 1 and Part 2, problem behaviours come in many forms. On this page: Managing Eccentrics and Flippancy “Eccentrics” are essentially harmless and often add […]

Dealing with Problem People (Part 2)

Dealing with people can sometimes be difficult. For a Project Management Professional (PMP)®, troublesome stakeholders can lead to sleepless nights and tempt us into easier ways of life, like juggling chainsaws. However, as we saw in the last article, focusing on problem behaviours and confronting these will help us to surmount these issues. In that article, […]

How to Motivate Project Team Members

If you are a Project Manager then part of your role is the management of your project team. This is why Project Resource Management is such a crucial part of the Project Management Professional (PMP)© courses we run. We explain how to acquire, develop and manage a project team and the main thing we want to achieve is a cohesive, […]

Leading a Team in Project Management | Velopi

During World War I, officers frequently climbed out of their trenches and charged at the enemy lines, armed with nothing but a swagger stick. On these occasions, I’m sure a fleeting moment of doubt passed through their minds: would the troops follow him into the charge? Or even, if morale was particularly low, would the […]

Project Stakeholder Engagement | Velopi

On this page: Once upon a time, in the state of Transylvania, Project Management Professionals (PMPs)® had identified a significant risk to their projects. The existence of the vampire, Count Dracula, was creating quite a few problems on the human resource front and many projects were running behind schedule because of staffing problems. However, the risk […]

Project Closure Checklist | Velopi

On this page: Agile practitioners who use the Scrum project management methodology are familiar with the the “definition of done”. Basically, every piece added to the product or service during the project has to conform to a well-defined set of acceptance criteria. In this way, nothing gets added into the final deliverable without conforming to […]