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Read Megan Keup’s Blog Post at the Link Below:

For any company to profit from a product, there must be a strategic plan in place to produce just enough to meet that need. Create too few products, and there’s a missed financial opportunity. Create too much, and money is wasted in production and warehousing.

Aggregate planning is a technique to create an equilibrium between demand and capacity. It’s something every company that is producing something needs to know. Let’s take a look at what aggregate production planning is and some aggregate planning strategies.

What Is Aggregate Planning?

Aggregate planning is a method for analyzing, developing and maintaining a manufacturing plan with an emphasis on uninterrupted, consistent production. Aggregate planning is most often focused on targeted sales forecasts, inventory management and production levels in the mid-term (3-to-18-month) future.

…Read More »

The post What Is Aggregate Planning? Strategies & Tips appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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Read  Regina Thomas‘ post at the link below:

Even if you’re the most skillful and experienced project manager, it’s important to understand that there is always room for improvement. This is because every project presents a new set of challenges that you might not be very familiar with. Here are some ways you could be improving project management: Build a great team As […]

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Read  Priyanka Agrawal‘s post at the link below:

There is a lot of conversation happening these days about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine learning, and Robotics. Artificial intelligence or AI is the ability of a system to understand what it is being asked of and then infer the best possible answer from all the available evidences. These trendy buzzwords, AI, robotics, machine learning, etc. may sound fascinating. However, they pose a serious and real threat – the threat to potentially alienate users and their experiences leading to trust issues and therefore abandoning adoption.

In one of my co-authored papers 14 years ago, at the Rigi Research group at the University of Victoria, we had proposed that humans should be treated as modeled, managed elements in an autonomic control loop to deter user alienation, improve user experiences and build user trust. We suggested synergistic design ideas to make communication with users more effective, and to allow the system to learn from the users’ actions. A system that exhibits initiative and interaction, creates a dialogue with humans and engages the people side of things is hence likely to be better adopted.

Fast forward to today, I am elated to see that our research aligned exactly with what is being asked of in today’s world. No wonder then our paper received 5,939 citations. Be it an enterprise-wide transformation or localized self-service web application, the human factor is of utmost importance. Today everything lies, not only around but also, within human experiences. As Digital-Media puts it, there can be no transformation without the human touch. Circumscribing digital transformation to the technological area is a grave error because change must be driven by the will, capacity, and commitment of people, in an organization where different generations coalesce. Read More […]

The post User experiences, Customer Journeys, Change Management and everything in between: The Common Element of Human Factors appeared first on Project Management Articles, Webinars, Templates and Jobs.
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Writing an Executive Summary Here’s the good news: an executive is short. It’s part of a larger document like a business plan or project proposal and, as the name implies, summarizes the longer report.

Here’s the bad news: it’s a critical document that can be challenging to write because an executive summary serves several important purposes. On one hand, executive summaries are used to outline each section of your business plan, investment proposal or project proposal. On the other hand, they’re used to introduce your business or project to investors and other stakeholders, so it must be persuasive to spark their interest.

The pressure of writing an executive summary comes from the fact that everyone will pay attention to it, as it sits at the top of that heap of documents. It explains all that follows and can make or break your business plan or project plan. The executive summary must know the needs of the potential clients or investors and zero in on them like a laser. Fortunately, we’ll show you how to write and format your executive summary to do just that.

What Is an Executive Summary?

An executive summary is a short section of a larger document like a business plan, investment proposal or project proposal. It’s mostly used to give investors and stakeholders a quick overview of important information about a business plan like the company description, market analysis and financial information.

It contains a short statement that addresses the problem or proposal detailed in the attached documents, and features background information, a concise analysis and a conclusion. An executive summary is designed to help executives and investors decide whether to go forth with the proposal or not, making it critically important. Pitch decks are often used along with executive summaries to talk about the benefits and main selling points of a business plan or project.

Unlike an abstract, which is a short overview, an executive summary format is a condensed form of the documents contained in the proposal. Abstracts are more commonly used in academic and research-oriented writing, and act as a teaser for the reader to see if they want to read on.

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The post How to Write an Executive Summary: A Quick Guide appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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PMBOK defines the project calendar as a resource which, “identifies working days and shifts that are available for scheduled activities. It distinguishes time periods in days or parts of days that are available to complete scheduled activities from time periods that are not available for work. A schedule model may require more than one project calendar to allow for different work periods for some activities to calculate the project schedule. The project calendars may be updated” (Project Management Institute, Inc., 2017). I have found project calendars essential for planning the next week, month or year of a project, and our team has come to rely on MS Teams for this work. Quincy Yarbrough explores the ins and outs of the project calendar at the link below. Read the article and then return and comment on how you’ve most effectively used project calendars in the past…

What Is a Project Calendar? A project management calendar is one of many formats for displaying a project schedule. In this case, the format is one we’re all very familiar with—regardless of our expertise with project management, we’ve all seen a calendar. For this reason, project calendars are an excellent way to share information about the project timeline with everyone on the team.

With that in mind, project planning calendars are a bit more complex than one you use in your everyday life. While their format is familiar, they include a wider array of information.

Why Are Project Management Calendars Important?

There’s a reason we still rely on a traditional calendar. They’re excellent tools for visualizing the passage of time and creating a schedule. Project managers rely on calendar views to illustrate schedules in an easy-to-digest style, often in conjunction with a Gantt chart, to display information as thoroughly as possible. That said, a project planning calendar is an excellent first step to take before mapping out a timeline.

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The post How to Make a Project Calendar for Project Management appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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Project Management Institute, Inc. (2017). A guide to the project management body of knowledge.

Decisions drive performance. When making important decisions, take the time to consider multiple perspectives, facts, opinions, and feelings. “If you rely only on your own knowledge and experience when tasked with deciding, you are missing an opportunity to get to an optimal outcome.  As smart as you may be, you can only gain by getting information, opinions, and experience from multiple sources with meaningful diverse perspectives.”[1]

Important decisions have both short-term and long-term impacts on your ability to meet objectives. The more important the decision, the more you want to combine analysis and intuition to come to the right one.

Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats approach is an example of a technique for looking at a subject from multiple perspectives, considering data and feelings with optimism, caution, and creativity, while managing the process.

Taking multiple perspectives on your own is powerful. Getting input from others increases the power. If you have access to knowledgeable people willing and able to give you the benefit of their intelligence, you augment your own intelligence.  You are still the decision-maker.

[…]

The post Improve Performance by Tapping into the Power of Collaborative Intelligence appeared first on Project Management Articles, Webinars, Templates and Jobs.
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Elizabeth Larson explores the lessons of courage BAs and PMs can take away from the 14th century chivalric romance poem:

There are many ingredients that enable us to influence others, including perhaps the hardest to achieve—courage. Unless we have the courage to recommend the right things for our organizations, to speak out when we think our stakeholders are on the wrong path, and to promote workable solutions that are unpopular with executives, we cannot hope to be influential. As PMs and BAs we need to be able to influence others as part of our job. And that takes courage.

I have always loved fantasy books/movies as well as those where the characters grow because they have found the courage to complete difficult tasks. That is why the Lord of the Rings trilogy has always been one of my favorites. And I remember loving the fourteenth-century poem that I read decades ago in college, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Seeing the movie The Green Knight, which is based on that poem, reminded my why—it’s a fantasy story about courage.

Sir Gawain, a knight in King Arthur’s court, undertakes a treacherous journey to fulfill a promise. The story is about integrity, knowing what is right and wrong, and making and meeting commitments—and the consequences of not doing so. There are many lessons BAs and PMs can learn about courage from the story. I’ve chosen 3 to discuss here.

[…]

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The better team members know their roles and responsibilities, the better a project is going to run. Therefore, communicating role distinctions early on in the project is crucial. But how can a project manager make those definitions clear and obvious to the team?

To do that, project managers use a responsibility assignment matrix. This project management tool is known by several names, such as RACI chart, RACI matrix or RACI template. It’s an efficient way to make sure everyone is on the same page and understands what they have to do. The last thing you want when you’re executing a project is confusion.

But before we dive into what a RACI matrix is and how to create one, let’s see what the RACI acronym means.

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The post How to Make a RACI Chart for a Project (with Example) appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge states that Control Schedule, “is the process of monitoring the status of the project to update the project schedule and managing changes to the schedule baseline” (Project Management Institute, Inc., 2017). I’ve heard it referred to as “working the plan” and, it’s my belief that projects most often go wrong when implementation of the plan fails. Read Marshall Simmons post at the link below, then return and comment on your schedule control methods.

Project Management Institute, Inc. (2017). A guide to the project management body of knowledge.

Projects are made up of many moving parts. One of the ways that you can determine if the project is behind or ahead of schedule is called schedule control.

Project planning, scheduling and control all go together when managing a project to stay on time and meet your deadlines. Learning what schedule control is and what you can do to best apply it can help you bring your next project in on-time and under budget.

What Is Schedule Control?

Schedule control is used in project management to monitor your activities and tasks to ensure you’re proceeding as planned. Of course, it’s more than just monitoring status. Project schedule control also means updating your project processes and managing change.

…Read More »

The post 5 Essential Tips for Schedule Control in Project Management appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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“I.T. was the best of times, I.T. was the worst of times, I.T. was the age of wisdom, I.T. was the age of foolishness, I.T. was the season of light, I.T. was the season of darkness, I.T. was the spring of hope, I.T. was the winter of despair…”  – Apologies to Charles Dickens.

The structured thought processes of the conventional information technology initiative make it most difficult to fathom the chaotic conditions under which some initiatives have been forced to exist and progress. Accounts follow of three real-world transformation initiatives observed in their respective environments, with subsequent analysis and introspection, however difficult, in the months and years following each initiative’s protracted imprisonment in its own Bastille. Perchance posterity can, from considering these telling accounts, be forewarned, find shared experience, be nourished by hope and so see their initiatives and organizations recalled to life.[…]

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