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No matter what industry you’re in, the one constant throughout the project life cycle of a project is paperwork. There is always plenty of paperwork to create, have approved, file and finally archive. All of those project management documents are important, but the Statement of Work (SOW) is easily one of the most important because it’s made at the outset of a project and outlines everything that needs to go into your project.

Using effective project planning tools and a thorough and well-written statement of work (SOW) will set you up to successfully lead a project over the finish line on schedule and within budget.

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The post What is a Statement of Work? Definition & Examples appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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If you’re looking to start or grow a business (or just keep a business profitable), you need a business plan. But not all plans are the same. If you need to define your business and its objectives, you need to use organizational planning.

That planning provides a clear path forward. When you organize the various departments of your business, everyone knows what their function is—and the tasks and processes necessary to achieve your business goals.

What Is Organizational Planning?

Organizational planning is how business owners organize the day-to-day operations of a business. This can range from simple things, like the companies’ reason for existence, to more complex considerations, like setting goals to realize a specific objective. You use the organizational plan as a framework for creating tasks that, when executed, will allow the company to achieve its goal.

Organizational planning is often used to improve a company’s overall business, but a company can direct it towards its workforce, finances or products. There are, therefore, various types of organizational planning goals; from workforce development and financial planning to products, services and expansion planning.

(or…Read More »

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Resources are what you need to execute your project plan—people,…Read More »

The post Identifying and Overcoming Resource Constraints in Project Management appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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Projects require an implementation plan, and that plan requires an implementation schedule. A schedule defines when project phases will start and end. Those dates might change depending on risk and constraints, but without an implementation schedule, things quickly go off track.

Getting your strategic plan into action requires an implementation schedule. A project implementation schedule takes all your tasks and organizes them into a tactical, actionable schedule. Having a well-thought-out project implementation plan helps bring in your project successfully.

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The post How to Create a Flawless Implementation Schedule for a Project appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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A blog post by Kelsey Jones detailing a time management technique:

What Is Time Blocking? Time blocking is a time management technique that consists in scheduling out everything in your entire day with time blocks, including meals, work projects and personal time in order to better manage time and discover where precious hours are either being wasted or underutilized.

Even though people have been using time blocking throughout history, the main proponent of this technique is Cal Newport. He’s the author of the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, which explains what time blocking is.

To understand how to use time blocking to manage your work schedule, we need to define its main components.

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The post A Quick Guide to Time Blocking appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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In late 2019/early 2020, the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice (DEHSP) developed a comprehensive strategic plan that outlined the key focus areas, objectives, and milestones the division planned to accomplish by 2024. The strategic plan was being disseminated right as the world was grappling with the uncertainty, fear, and panic of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like so many other businesses and organizations, almost overnight we faced a monumental disruption to the ways we had to think about our division’s priorities and resources. While we had an intricately crafted and thoroughly researched strategic plan, we soon learned we would need to be flexible and adapt to the unexpected changes resulting from COVID-19.

Within any project, business, or organization, the imperative of crafting detailed roadmaps is clear: you need them to achieve your goals and to prioritize resources while maximizing efficiency. Without a clear definition of how you will achieve success or get from point A to point B, projects or organizations can face delays, cost overruns, or an end result that isn’t desired.
Following the completion of the division’s strategic plan, the concept of lift points was developed by division leaders to identify the work that would successfully lift the reach and impact of the entire division. The lift point concept provided leaders with a framework for implementing the strategic plan in a way that attempted to remove silos across the division, highlighted the cross-cutting nature of division-wide priorities, and further prioritized strategic plan objectives through 2024. With CDC’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, DEHSP staff availability became limited, resources were stretched to capacity, and the strategic plan implementation efforts were temporarily halted. After six months of dedicating resources almost exclusively to the pandemic response, leadership revisited the lift points with a renewed understanding of the importance of establishing and implementing clear-cut, focused priorities. We recognized the value in strategically directing division resources to strengthen programming and maximize efficiencies. Division leaders chose to re-focus their energy on clarifying and addressing the lift points, despite the challenging resource constraints.

Charting The Path Forward: Establishing Lift Points

[…]

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Work in the dark and eventually you’re going to hit a wall. While the myth of the entrepreneur who comes up with a million-dollar idea and then just sits back and watches the money roll in might be persuasive, it’s a fiction, businesses need to plan and execute tasks in an organized manner.

To do that, every company needs business processes to manage work and achieve its goals. A business process is a series of tasks or steps that need to be taken by an organization to accomplish a concrete goal.
Managing these business processes makes companies efficient and that’s why business process management (BPM) was created. Business process management is a discipline that uses a series of tools and methods to help managers streamline business processes.

One of those methods it’s called business process mapping. Let’s define what it is and why it is so important when managing business processes.

What Is Business Process Mapping?

Business process mapping consists in using a workflow diagram or process map to visually represent a business process and define:

• What the business process steps are
• Who’s responsible for what in the business process
• What tools will be used
• What the standard is for completing that business process
• How success is determined

With a clear workflow diagram or detailed business process map, it is easy to see where improvements in the business process can be made to increase efficiencies and productivity. This is also a way to take a specific objective and measure it in order to compare against the overall objectives of the business, ensuring that they’re in alignment.

Now that we understand what business process mapping is, let’s learn how to create a process map.

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Mir and Pinnington indicate that traditional PM systems which rely on the success criteria of cost, time, quality and meeting technical requirements have become considered ineffective and point to other models, such as EFQM as potentially effective (Mir & Pinnington, 2014). Read George Pitagorsky’s article at the link below in which he champions candor as a vital component of effective performance assessment.

Performance assessment is a critical part of optimal performance. When done well it brings intelligence, effective processes, mindfulness, and self-awareness to bear to sustain and continuously improve performance. Unfortunately, performance assessment is often not done well. Recent discussions about performance reviews make me ask:

• Why do people have such a tough time admitting that they screwed up?
• Where does the tendency to hide mistakes come from?
• What benefit does it provide? What does it cost?
• Wouldn’t mindfully saying something like
  “The situation is terrible, we misread the conditions, we could have acted differently. We’ll learn from this and do better next time. Meanwhile we will do our best to manage the current situation.” be better?

Candor – Open and Honest
Candor is being open and honest. It implies that bad news not be filtered out.

This article is about the need to value candor to better enable performance assessment and the improvement it can bring. How do we overcome the habits of blaming, perfectionism, unrealistic expectations, and fear of rejection and punishment that get in the way of owning up to performance shortfalls? […]

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Mir, F. A., & Pinnington, A. H. (2014). Exploring the value of project management: linking project management performance and project success. International journal of project management, 32(2), 202-217.

Most projects have stakeholders that expect a return on their…Read More »

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Businesses are always looking to balance supply with demand to…Read More »

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