Why "excellent" project management? | Shortage of good project managers
Tips | Using the tools | Key elements of project management 

Why you need excellent project management

Project Management is, of course, vital to the successful completion of large projects. Big-ticket technology rollouts and big-dollar projects may have teams of project managers. Yet, project management is also for small projects--even personal projects that have nothing to do with your job.

Everyone needs the skills to complete a project on time and under budget, without compromising quality targets. If you deal with customers and approach project management with less than a full arsenal of skills, you are operating minus a competitive edge. Today's customer wants it fast, cheap, and good. And today's customer brooks no excuses, shows no mercy, and simply goes to whomever will provide what the customer wants when the customer wants it at a price the customer is willing to pay. This is not the way it was for project managers before the Information Age, but it is a reality today.

Shortage of good project managers

You may think you can outsource your project management. Good luck. All kinds of people claim to know how to manage projects. They may even excel in one area of project management, but still not have the skills to deliver a project under today's requirements. They have experience and training in project management, but not be updated to deal with today's project management requirements. Generally, you must do your own project management or hire and train your own internal project managers. If you do find a good third-party source of project managers, treat them very, very well.

If you build your own project management team, you can vertically integrate. No matter what industry you are in, providing a turnkey answer to a customer need is a definite marketing and sales advantage. But, to be able to take on vertically integrated projects, you need people who can do more than make some charts and do some cheerleading.

Using the tools

• Critical Path Method: What it is and what mistakes to avoid. It's not just coming up with a chart and hoping other people can work to it. There are ways to use this method for more than just scheduling work. A CPM analysis presented at contract T&Cs can make a difference between record profit and record loss on a job.

• PERT: What it is and how to use it effectively. Same situation as CPM. Yet, few project managers fully take advantage of PERT, except as a way of further refining their CPM analysis. Big mistake.

• Gant charts: Tips, tricks, and success secrets to using these charts effectively. Ah, you are seeing a pattern, here. Gant charts should do far more than hang on walls. You'd be amazed at the things truly seasoned project managers use them for. Can you think of three things? Four? If not, you are not at your maximum level of project management competency.

• The magical spreadsheet: How you can use spreadsheets to make mincemeat out of your competition. If you haven't spent hours training yourself on spreadsheet uses (electronic or otherwise), you have not been training yourself to be a shark-proof project manager. You should be a spreadsheet wizard, if you want to be a project management champion. That doesn't mean you need to know every arcane function of Microsoft Excel. No, it means you need to know where row and column analysis can make big differences.

Some project management tips

Here are some general guidelines--you can get specifics from our courses.

1. Define things up front. Too often, project managers delve into an assignment without nailing down the objectives, resources, client responsibilities, and deadlines. Our courses will show you exactly what you need to nail down and what things you can proceed on--in other words, we show you were to focus while not leaving your hind end exposed.
2. Communicate clearly. Oh, sure, we pay lip service to this. But, when you read the typical project documents, you find they have a lot of words but don't convey enough information. Our courses show you how to prevent this problem.
3. Delegate early. Don't wait for everything to be perfect before giving tasks to key people. Simply throwing them into a situation with the attitude that you have all the answers doesn't work. Delegate some things to key players so more than one mind is at work.
4. Build a team. This means understanding who the players--their  needs, strengths, weaknesses, desires, and other aspects. Too often, project managers just assign bodies and depend on a "star" or two to carry the day. Our courses show you how to build a team that functions well.
5. Organize and manage information. Studies repeatedly show project managers don't do this function well. The reason is a lack of training in how. Our courses show you how.
6. Use the WBS for planning and execution. Your Work Breakdown Structure is far more than a project document. Used properly, it allows you to save enormous amounts of time and to make correct decisions on staffing, scheduling, and supplying--among other things. Again, our courses show you the way.
7. Give everyone ownership of something. People do better work when they own it. Each member of your team needs to feel important and to be held accountable for something.
8. Replace wasted steps with value-added. If you could reduce your labor on a project by 10% with no added cost, delay or loss of quality, would you do it? Suppose you could reduce it more than that? We show you how to examine your processes to eliminate steps that are pure cost. At one company, we reduced costs by $750,000 a year with a single change.
9. Prevent chargebacks. Think about projects where your  tradeworkers had to tear out what another team's tradeworkers did, and then pay a chargeback for the rework--for example, tearing outa wall to add some electrical work and then repairing the wall. We show you how to prevent this.
10. Make the client your ally. By explaining to the client what they can do to help you meet objectives, deadlines, cost-control, and quality standards, you can come out way ahead. The traditional attitude that the customer is a lazy slug who stays up late at night dreaming of ways to derail your project is not what will make you successful. Clients have a vested interest in your success. Our courses show you how to align the efforts of all parties toward that end.
11. Reduce or eliminate change orders. You either eat the cost in dollars or you eat it in goodwill. Why not follow our simple, proven strategies for preventing change orders?
12. Don't allow callbacks to kill profits. A single callback can wipe out all the profit in one project. Yet, callbacks are more common than not. How do you prevent these? We'll show you!