Your Guide to Project Management Best Practices

How to overcome project failure

How-to Guides

How to Overcome Project Failure and Succeed in Project Management

An attempt to overcome previously failed projects and succeed in future initiatives can be challenging. If your project has been launched before but failed for some reasons, most likely your team and other stakeholders have a negative mindset towards the failure reasons can be addressed and a new project will be successful. The customer or/and the sponsor of the failed project may even convince themselves that they no longer need the outcome that was expected for delivery and so they’re not going to give a new try. Meanwhile, a thorough analysis of failed project management (PM) can greatly help understand what was done wrong, develop feasible solutions, and remove any barrier for future success. Below I give a 6-step approach I personally use in my organization to overcome project failure and succeed in PM.

Agile vs Waterfall Custom PM

PM Framework

Going Agile vs Waterfall Approach? Custom Project Management is Better

The question ‘What is better – Agile or Waterfall?’ remains open, even regardless that both approaches are well defined and their best practices are explored and proven for given business environments. Because different companies have different values, every organization needs to decide on either a traditional, step-by-step project management approach or an iterative-based, highly-adaptive method for planning and managing the business objectives. But is there another option, except for considering Agile vs Waterfall approach? Apparently, there is. Custom project management (PM) provides a framework that combines traditional PM methods with adaptive, iteration-driven practices. Today many businesses begin to customize the way they plan and do their business projects to tailor their PM approach to their business needs.

Project Time Tracking Tips

PM Tips & Ideas

Five Common Tips on Tracking Time in Projects

Time tracking is one of the biggest parts of a project manager’s job. Because time is critical to success, it needs to be tracked against the schedule throughout the entire project lifecycle until all scheduled activities are accomplished, the customer accepts the product, and all documentation is closed and archived. The project manager takes primary responsibility for monitoring schedule performance, making necessary adjustments, and taking corrective action. In this article I want to highlight 5 common tips on how to make time tracking in projects more effective.

managing requirements in agile project

IT & Software

5 Best Practices for Managing Requirements in Agile Projects

Success of agile project management greatly depends on the approach to requirements specification which includes several best practices. The agile approach promotes a highly iterative, collaborative environment in which the team, project manager and senior stakeholders enjoy flexibility in addressing any inherent risks associated with managing requirements. An interesting feature of this approach is that a change to project requirements can be turned into a competitive advantage later on, as compared to the traditional approach which doesn’t ensure adaptability to the changing environment. In this article, I write about 5 best practices for managing requirements in agile projects.

Mind Mapping for project planning and management

PM Framework

Mind Mapping for Project Planning and Management

Creativity, patience and organizational ability are all important talents for project managers, but detailed documentation is a critical success factor which should addressed first of all, and mind mapping is a great way to manage project documentation. Because mind maps create visual and easy-to-understand-and-follow documents, many professionals regard this tool as ideal for project planning and management. Priorities, tasks, dependencies, milestones, resources, durations, lead times and more can be visualized and presented to the team with help of mind mapping software. And you don’t have to be well experienced in idea visualization and presentation – everything you need is to use your creativity and have right understanding of subject matter to stimulate your mind and create a project map, either Gantt chart, WBS hierarchy, Team organizational chart, or whatever else document.