Posts by Kevin Lonergan
What makes a great project manager?
What makes them successful? There are many blog posts and discussions on ‘what makes a great project manager’. It’s a question you could write a book on. Here we are summarising a few important ideas, observations and experiences. Firstly, let’s deal with one point that gets us absolutely nowhere! Places like Linkedin abound with questions like…
Read MoreThe Challenge of Virtual Project Teams
Virtual teams bring their own specific challenges: Many organisations are needing to or want to deliver projects today via virtual project teams. Business activity requires this, given the global nature of projects and the various parties and partners who can be involved in any given project. The way we all work today, with heavy use…
Read MoreThe Challenge of Project Management Lessons Learned
So how successful are current methods? Much is written about the need to do ‘Lessons Learned‘ on projects. Typically it is confined to a single meeting or similar to discuss the items that are worthy of capture under this heading. There is often little, or even nil discussion about how ‘we’ in business actually…
Read MoreProject Risk Assessment: worked example on Slideshare
We have published a short presentation on Slideshare here: Project Risk Assessment Worked Example. Some key notes on the above: it only covers the stage of conducting a qualitative assessment of a collection of project risks – it does not cover risk identification or risk management planning. it contains important hints and tips and things to…
Read MoreEarned Value Management: Worked Example – on Slideshare
We have published a short presentation on Slideshare here: Earned Value Management Worked Example. Some key notes on the above: it is intended to give those who are new to the topic a simple overview of the concept and workings of EVM – it is deliberately kept simple to ensure it is easy to…
Read MoreWhen you don’t have a plan, do you have a project?
Or maybe you have what many people call the ‘happy plan’ It has been a long-held view among most of the PM community that if you have a project, it is a good thing to have a plan, and most experienced project managers would agree with that. However, when you look at the evidence…
Read MoreEarned Value Management (EVM) and Objectivity
What is this and why is it so important? Earned value management is a sound management concept that has existed for decades, but it often struggles in terms of credibility for a number of reasons. Many of those reasons relate to the manner in which it is implemented, and by that, we mean the methods…
Read MoreCan you combine Agile with Prince2 ®/ MSP? ®
Or perhaps the question is, why on earth would you want to? There are people claiming that Agile can be combined with Prince2 ®. While we are not saying this is impossible, our view is that the approaches are quite simply incompatible and others warn this is more like mixing oil and water. I am not alone in…
Read MoreWhat is Project Management?
What you will find in this post: This post describes all the core elements of project management. It then describes the origins of PM concepts and techniques. Finally, it describes best practices in recent years. Firstly let’s define project management: Project Management is the combined skills and processes required to define, plan, manage and deliver…
Read MoreWhen Earned Value is not Earned Value at all :(
Firstly some background: We have been formally involved in implementing Earned Value Management (EVM) with customers since 1993, and hopefully during that time have learned one or two things about EVM. One of those is that it does throw up lots of challenges and questions to businesses when they first try and do it –…
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