Project and Programme Management #10: Resources and Levelling

The first thing to say about this topic is that it is one of the most difficult parts of project planning because often the information you need is hard to obtain.

Project and Programme Management #09: Activity Network

Last time I described how to create a product breakdown structure. The next thing to do is to define how the products are linked together using an activity network.

Project and Programme Management #08: Product Breakdown Structure

So far in looking at the Business Case I have covered the why and who – let’s move on to look at the what and when.

Project and Programme Management #07: Project Board and Team

In my last article I looked at stakeholder analysis as a means of identifying the key people that you need to communicate with in your project: part of the “who” in a business case. The business case also needs to consider a more detail a subset of the “who”: those responsible for actually doing the project work. This splits into two groups: those responsible for the decision-making and those responsible for delivering the project’s products or outputs. If you use a formal project management methodology like PRINCE2, the former will be the project board and the latter the project team. The project manager forms a bridge between them.

Project and Programme Management #06: Stakeholders

My last article covered the justification section of the business case: the “why”. This article moves on to look at the “who” and introduces stakeholder management.

Project and Programme Management #05: Justification

If you have read the previous posts in this project management series, you’ll know that the starting point for a business case is some kind of assessment of the complexity of your project. Not only does this give you an idea of how detailed your business case must be, but it provides some of the information that you can use and expand upon in your business case.

Project and Programme Management #04: Project assessment

When you are preparing to write a business case, you need to have some idea of the size and complexity of your project, to give you a guide as to how much work needs to go into the business case (and subsequent project management). One or two pages may be sufficient for a “new garden shed”, but a lot more detail and analysis is needed for “a new office building”.

Project and Programme Management #03: Business case

The Business Case

As noted in my previous article, it is vital that you clarify the project or programme overall objectives and scope with the sponsor. Once you have done that, the next task is to write a business case for your project. A business case explains:

Project and Programme Management #02

This post focuses on identifying and clarifying the objectives and scope of a project or programme.

Project and Programme Management #01

Introduction

This is the first of a planned series on project and programme management. I have always held back from blogging about this subject – especially the basics – as there is so much material already available. However there seems to be a never failing demand for people to want to know the basics (e.g. questions and discussion threads on LinkedIn and the like), so hopefully this will help. If even just one or two readers find this useful, it’ll have been worth doing. Please feel free to post comments, especially suggestions for future topics.

RBS CEO to get £4.5 Million shares bonus

It's been more than a year since my last "angry" post about banks and bankers. In the UK the government knows that the general public is unhappy about the way that the banks escaped any penalty or punishment over the financial crisis that they helped bring on. Yet it has done little about it.

Can you or I save the world?

We hear such a lot about the problems of our world, and especially the human-caused ones: environmental damage, exploitation, warfare, etc. These are huge issues and we can feel powerless to affect them. But if we allow that thinking to stop us, then we truly are doomed. We (the little people – that’s you and I) can affect these big, world-wide matters: for good or bad.

Social Media - some nice examples

In the past I have posted on the good and also the bad influences and uses of Social Media. This follow up focuses on some really great “good” uses of Social Media I’ve come across recently. If you have any examples, perhaps you could add a comment to point them out?