Mary Levinson | Your Guide to Project Management Best Practices - Part 29

Your Guide to Project Management Best Practices

Author: Mary Levinson

project-failure-how-to-fail-a-project

How-to Guides

How to Fail a Project, or What You Shouldn’t Do When Managing Your Project

Most people involved in planning and managing projects often do not realize why they fail with their projects because they have no idea of project management failures and common reasons for project failure. Do you want to know why you failed with your last project? In this quick review I will tell you about the most frequent project management failures and also teach you how to fail with a project. Why do you need to teach you this? The answer is that I believe a person will get more chances to succeed in project management & planning if he or she is aware of what SHOULD NOT be done within their projects. I hope that through teaching you to fail projects and showing you project management failure examples you will better understand how to achieve project management success and not to do all those wrong things that many project managers and planners do.

Team Conflict in Project Management: Definition, Classification, Resolution Process

Teamwork & Leadership

Team Conflict in Project Management: Definition, Classification, Resolution Process

Having the right understanding the defintion of team conflict and being able to classify all conflicts between employees into types will allow team leaders and managers to look into the actual reasons of group conflicts and find solutions that help resolve interpersonal problems. Although conflicts are inevitable, decision makers should strive to reduce the likelihood of conflict occurrence. They must mitigate the negative impact of group conflicts and try to increase the positive impact of those conflicts. This article describes the definition of team conflict and also lists types of team conflict.

pm mentoring

Teamwork & Leadership

PM Mentoring – The Importance of Project Staff Training

Perhaps you can hardly find organizations that do not try to follow the practice of successful project management mentoring and project staff training, because the modern competitive environment dictates to business organizations to have educated and skilled employees who can do daily tasks and perform projects with less time and money consumed. Through practising project management mentoring and training, any organization can direct and coordinate its human and material resources throughout the project life-cycle to accomplish established goals within the scope, expected quality, time and budget, while meeting expectations of the stakeholders. Excellence in planning and implementing projects will be achieved if the organization owns training personnel that has earned online project management certifications and accomplished project management certificate programs. In this article I would like to describe a definition of project management mentoring and list its benefits so that you would see the importance of project staff mentoring.

team building tips

Teamwork & Leadership

Several Tips on Building Effective Teams

To put the goals in line with the team competencies and find the balance, you should plan your activities for group building in advance and assemble team members which have required skills and abilities to meet your project goals. The success of your team building leadership will depend on the success of your team to perform project tasks and deliver the project. Group management, team building and personal motivation should be considered as the basis for developing and supporting an effective team and establishing teamwork.

project initiation glag

How-to Guides

How to Initiate Projects Successfully (Part II)

When the project is defined and the project chart is developed, it is time to acquire and assign the team. At this step of the project initiating phase, the project board is to be established and the project manager is to take responsibility for acquiring the project team and assigning it to project tasks and activities. The project manager needs to recruit the team leader(s) who will assist the project manager in initiating project by selecting and recruiting required project staff (members of the project team). The team leaders take responsibility for making team assignments and the project manager approves these assignments.

During the project initiating phase, the core activity for making right team assignments refers to developing job descriptions. A project job description is a formal project initiating document that states and explains what project roles are required to complete the project work and produce the deliverables, what targets each role is assigned to, and how to measure the targets and to access the performance of each role. Every team member should be assigned to a detailed project job description which defines personal role and responsibilities within the project. When initiating project and developing project roles, the team leaders need to consider the project initiating documents (Project Charter, Feasibility Study).