Five years ago if someone told me I’d be working for a project management company, I may have died laughing.
Early in my professional career I realized the joys of working in the customer service world: making my customers happy and confident in the work I provided, and getting my hands dirty. This is why the Steel industry was a good fit for me. I took care of customer orders, organized company events, traveled to see customers and whatever other administrative work needed to be done. I even got down and dirty in the plant a few times. read more…
Having constraints of limited resources, of limited time, and quite possibly of limited intelligence (!) is an ever-present reality that requires all of us to make decisions about what to do with the time and money that we have. This basic fact of life applies to individuals, to families, to small businesses, to multi-national corporations and to every business unit in the public and private sector.
No one is given a pass. read more…
A blog from the accounting office, (ha)… I do numbers all day, I don’t write (unless it’s bulleted procedures or expense reports). I would prefer a Calculus class over creative writing any day! I just want to throw that out there right up front in hopes that I won’t be judged too harshly; please. With that being said, I did volunteer to jot down my thoughts today because I am excited to share how my recent Microsoft Project “study-buddy sessions” with my coworkers are starting to become a real benefit to my department. read more…
One of the many discussions I have with customers is how to factor in time that is spent on project management in their schedule.
Most of those discussions land on the following:
- Project management is a significant effort on a project and should be tracked.
- Project managers are not working full-time on one project and their work effort should be adjusted.
- One long task that represents project management screws up the critical path because it may assume that it is the true critical path when instead the rest of the project contains the information you need to see for the critical path.
After exploring numerous techniques to address this and working with solutions I have created myself or received from others, I have discovered an approach that can work. read more…
I remember my days in the military where we often sat down in front of our computers to “receive training” that was being delivered via CBT. I soon was conditioned to cringe at the thought of yet another episode of online learning, as the tool quickly turned from exciting and engaging (it was new after all) to laborious and ghastly. Despite my love for technology I found the simple clicking through screens to be repulsive and downright painful! We quickly learned some of the fastest techniques to “stop the pain” and click through to the end, achieving the desired goal: a certificate of completion. We moved on to the real business of learning. read more…
