Skip to main content

Posts

PMP | Important Topics

Conflict Management | For Project Success

While you are trying hard to push a deliverable for the targeted date, you find your team discussing the pros and cons for the design of a crucial component. Worse your two very senior architects have very different opinion on the solution, How you as PM ensure that the project meets its target milestone with quality and efficiency, having high team moral??  Is this too much to ask or deal with? I'm sure all of us who is reading this post have been in situations. Conflict can arise due to many reason few are below: Conflict over project priorities Conflict over administration procedures Conflict over technical opinions and performance trade-offs Conflict over human resources Conflict over cost and budget Conflict over schedules Personality conflict How do you handle them? It depends on the project manager, the organisation structure and climate.  Conflict Root cause Management (Typical) Conflict Sources and Best Practices ...

Critical Path Method (CPM) Simplified..

A critical path is the longest path in the network.  Each node which falls under critical path has zero or negative float (Slack). Now how do we calculate critical path?? Sample Node I’ve seen various illustrations having different way to calculate CPM, few are: -           The project starts on day 1. -           The project starts on day 0. Both the approaches give same results, however I liked the day 0 approach better, its simpler, easy and lesser room for errors. Example Figure 1 - Example  There are 3 steps to calculate CPM: 1. Forward Pass - To calculate the Early Start(ES) and Early Finish(EF) of node. 2. Backward Pass - To calculate Late Start (LS) and Late Finish(LF) of node. 3. Calculate Float and Thus CPM. The Forward Pass: Forward Pass Illustration We start from first Node or Start node. The works begin on day 0....

Change Management - What’s so complex about it?

Perform Integrated Change Control is one of the process under monitoring & Controlling process group and in Integration knowledge area. One of the most weighted process in PMP examination and you can expect lot of questions from this process. Let’s pick up few instances: A team member comes to you and proposes changes in high level design for security module interfaces. He feels confident that introducing those changes will lead to lesser efforts and more secured and de- coupled interfaces.  You (Project Manager) along with few senior team leads is having a meeting with customer to get the prototype sign off. The customer feels that the screen is too bland and needs a better UI (User Interface) Your senior manager comes up to you and informs you that the inter-related BPO project has few changes in the process and hence the current project (under me) needs to change the current workflow to match the updated workflow.   What do you think...