The Project Management Office
Project Plan Template
The Project Management Plan is central to PMBOK project management. We suggest you start with this template then use subsidiary management plans to further build out your project plan.
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Project Charter Template
Every successful project starts with a good Project Charter. We have two Project Charter templates available, a short one page version and a longer more comprehensive version.
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Business Case Template
Before starting a project many organizations require a formal business case to be developed. Our business case template will help you to get started.
Top 7 PMBOK Templates
In this week’s blog we have compiled a list of what we believe are the Project Management Body of Knowledge’s (PMBOK) seven most critical project management templates. Each of these templates represents an important part of an effective and integrated project plan.
- Project Charter – The project charter can be considered the foundation of a project. A completed and signed project charter establishes the authority to begin a project to address a business need that has been identified. Great care and detail should go into the creation of a charter because of its importance. If you sacrifice quality with the project charter, your project performance and deliverables will almost surely suffer. Click Here to Download Our Project Charter Template.
- Project Management Plan - If the project charter is the foundation of a project, the project management plan is its core. The project management plan is important because it is an integrated framework which includes the management plans from all of the project management knowledge areas. It ties these management plans together into a collective whole which is then used to manage the project through to completion. Click Here to Download Our Project Management Plan Template.
Top 6 Tips for Passing Your PMP Exam
The Project Management Professional (PMP®) credential is widely recognized as one of the most challenging certifications, requiring coursework and years of experience in order to sit for a challenging examination. About seventy percent of those taking the exam pass. Here, we provide tips to help assure you aren’t in the thirty percent bracket. With care and diligence, you should do well, but you can’t enter the exam blindly.
Having decades of experience is not enough to pass. You must understand the examination and certainly be able to speak the underlying language. In fact, the establishment of a common language for communication is one of the prime benefits afforded by the Project Management Body of Knowledge® as embodied in the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). That is, there is a body of knowledge that is described in the associated book, a key distinction.
On with the tips!
Five Tips for Effective Project Management
Project Management has come a long way in recent years turning a loosely-tied community of practitioners into a growing and thriving industry through governing and certifying organizations like Project Management Institute (PMI), and others. Today’s project manager can benefit from training and knowledge sharing through these organizations and their members across the industry. Project managers enter the field with much stronger preparation and training than in years past. However, as we all understand, formal training, while beneficial, cannot fully substitute for years of experience. This is true in most professional fields and project management is no exception. While there are no shortages of tricks of the trade from experienced practitioners, these tips provide both new and experienced project managers opportunities to look outside of their formal training toward more effective project management.
Oh, No! You Gave Me What I Asked For!!
Today it seems that everyone has an idea for a monster web site or product that will be “the next big thing.” Many of those that don’t are in the business of developing sites for those who do. In today’s economy more people than ever are entrepreneurs of all sorts, whether envisioning web sites, starting or expanding businesses, or any of thousands of other things. What they have in common is that they are in fact (perhaps unbeknownst to themselves) project managers. Bill Gates wasn’t too far off the mark when decades ago he predicted that one day grandmothers would often be software developers or at least hire them.
Proven time and again, their projects, like all projects in organizations of every size, often end in failure. A project that initially seems to have a clear path to success turns out, amazingly, to be a twisted road with ice and ravines at every turn. In business, lose-lose propositions, though all too common, can be disastrous for all involved. Failure can be in totally wasted funds and even total business failure. In short, these failures can end in lost dreams.
Measuring Project Performance
It’s happened to nearly every project manager sometime in their career. They’re given the requirement to provide detailed performance reporting on a project and end up spending most of their time entering hours worked into work packages in Microsoft Project and estimating percent complete on these packages – on a daily basis. Whether the requirement for that level of reporting was real or perceived, the project manager finds that he’s unable to manage the day to day activities of his project because he’s too busy trying to measure the project’s performance.
When a successful company invests time, money, and other resources in a project, its primary concern is always what it is getting in return for its investment. It is the responsibility of the project manager to ensure these projects stay on schedule and within their approved budget. Performance measurement provides the project manager with visibility to make sure he is operating within the approved time and cost constraints and that the project is performing according to plan. It also alerts management if a project begins to run over budget or behind schedule so actions can quickly be taken to get the project back on track.