Tom Mochal

If you’re thinking about pursuing a career in project management but you’re not sure it’s the right path, consider this list of signs that might point you in a different direction.

The right mix of planning, monitoring, and controlling can make the difference in completing a project on time, on budget, and with high quality results. These guidelines will help you plan the work and work the plan.

Plenty of things can derail a project plan: underestimated tasks, departing staff, misallocated resources. Here are some practical techniques that can correct the direction of a project that’s losing ground.

Once you understand the effort that’s required for a project, you can assign resources to determine how long the project will take and estimate labor and non-labor costs. Here’s a process you can use to estimate the total effort required for your project.

It’s difficult to build a solution if you don’t know the requirements (in spite of the fact that many teams still try to do it today). The “elicitation” step is where the requirements are first gathered from the client. Many techniques are available for gathering requirements. Each has value in certain circumstances, and in many …

There are two places that scope is defined on your project. High-level scope is defined in your project charter. Low-level scope is defined in your business requirements document. High-level scope consists of two main components. Deliverables. If you can’t remember anything else about scope, list your deliverables. Defining your deliverables goes a long way toward …

The purpose of a project status report is to manage expectations by commenting on any and all items that show a variance from your project baselines and stakeholder expectations. Typical status reports not only describe accomplishments against the assigned activities, but they also comment on work that is behind schedule, problems that are being dealt …

Regardless of the technique you use, the tendency in project estimation is to provide one number for each estimate. In other words, if you have 100 activities on your schedule, each activity would have one estimate associated with it. This is generally viewed as the “most likely” estimate.In many cases you can be more accurate …

A lot of project managers are intimidated by the notion of risk management. However, this simple five-step process will be more than adequate for most projects.

Any project manager knows that no project is completed in perfect circumstances. So you should use the following process and techniques if you want to make your schedule estimate as realistic as possible.

Tom Mochal cover these two methods of fixing a project schedule.

Once you understand the effort that’s required, you can assign resources to determine how long a project will take (duration) and then you can estimate labor and non-labor costs.