Project Management Acronyms

I quess when you read stuff related to project management you find a lot of abbreviations, so i decided to gather some and share with you. Here are the first 15:

1. WBS – Work Breakdown Structure: fundamental project management technique for projects scope definition and organization uses hierarchical tree structure.
2. EVA – Economic Value Added: financial performance method to calculate the true profit of the company.
3. BCWP – Budget Cost of Work Performed: measures the budgeted cost of work that has actually been performed up to date.
4. ACWP – Actual Cost of Works Performed: total cost of work completed up to date.
5. TM – Time Management. Check my post about time management
6. PSI – Probability of Success Indicator: a concept used in the book “How to Run Successful Projects III: The Silver Bullet” by Fergus O’Connell.
7. PMBOK – Project Management Body Of Knowledge: term describing knowledge in the field of project management.
8. XP – Extreme Programming: software engineering methodology (a form of agile software development).
9. RUP – Rational Unified Process: iterative software development process.
10. 7P – Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People Process, Physical evidence: or the so called Extended Marketing Mix.
11. PO – Purchase Order: written sales contract between buyer and seller indicating services, payment terms, delivery dates etc.
12. SLA – Service Level Agreement: a part of a service contract, where the level of contract is formally defined.
13. RFP/RFQ – Request For Proposal/Quotation
14. NDA – Non-Disclosure Agreement: as well know as a confidentiality agreement.
15. TCO – Total Cost of Ownership: how much it actually costs, direct and indirect costs.

Hope this will make thing a bit easier for you Wait for other 15 soon!

Project Management Methodologies

Starting on project management? Then you have come to the right place. You will find a lot of tips, best practices, project management tools reviews and much more in our blog. Now, the first thing you need to do is to sign up for a account. Next, without any doubt, you need to some theoretical background. I am not going to tell what project management is and what it is not, soon you will find that out by yourself. In this post I would like to introduce you to the main project management methodologies. Please keep in mind that my focus is on IT projects management.

It is important to distinguish that different methodologies are focusing on different elements:
• CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) – management is built around PROCESS (i.e. Transformation is the core and entities it uses are secondary)
• PMBOK (provides the fundamentals of project management as they apply to a wide range of projects) – is also built mostly around processes (i.e. its 9 bodies of knowledge are organized around 9 major processes, although usually each process is dedicated to management of 1 important object like “Management of cost”, “Communication management”, ”Risk Management” etc. )
• RUP – actually in the middle – i.e. entities (RUP: artefacts) and transformations (RUP: Activities organized into disciplines) are balanced. And roles are pretty well refined and described.
• XP – management is built mostly around entities (i.e. focus on Time, Cost, Scope, Quality). Processes are incremental and iterative, we can also say it’s “every-day-work”.

You can see the main focus points of every methodology in the table provided below:

Aspect	CMMI	PMBOK	RUP	XP
LIFECYLE(activity)	PLAN: Estimate Build Plan (formal paper) Obtain Commitments (Human-related) CONTROL Monitoring against Plan Corrective Actions when required	Initiating processes Planning Executing Controlling Finalizing	Project Start Manage Iteration/Project Plan next Iteration Project Closure	Manage Iteration Plan (partial) next Iteration (moving works further, descopings etc.)
ENTITIES	Like in RUP but more heavier (for example “Life-cycle model” etc.)	Manage 4 parameters: Expense: Cost and Time Result: Scope and Quality Manage other issues: People and communication Freelancers (subcontractors) Risk	Work orders Issues Risks Plan Assessment	4 Parameters: Cost Time Scope Quality

As you can see they all have a lot in common, but at the same time they are very different, so choose carefully, because when something will go wrong in the project, or not the way you planned (and I can assure you that it is very likely to happen), it will not be the best time to think about your management methods, so do your homework and come back for more!

Online Project Management

Check my other blog about online project management

Time management lecture from Randy Pausch

What is time management? why do you need time management? Can you manage TIME? You can bet there are thousands of questions about time management, it is actually a never ending story, i invite you to watch a nice lecture presented at the Virginia University by Randy Pausch, enjoy

Top 5 when choosing Project Management Software

1. Feature Set – Companies have different views what a project management software should include, so read carefully before you choose. Do not get on the marketing tricks like “Our time tracking tool is the best project management tool”, keep your eyes open, a good project management software needs much more then that.
2. Web-based – can be accessed from anywhere, anytime, multi-user.
3. Support – everybody claims that their support is superior, but is it? First thing I’d do, I’d email support with some simple questions and suggestions maybe, and see how quick and how good the respond is.
4. Collaboration – first of all this means working with other team members on a task to reach a defined goal. In other words it’s just day to day communication, and you’ll want this to be as effective as possible – emails, blogs, video conferencing, intranets, extranets etc.
5. Integration – an integrated system combines project management or project planning, with many other aspects of company life. Can the system be integrated with a third party tools? Make sure it does.

Of course there can be said much more on this topic, but i think these are the key things to consider when choosing a project management software. Choose wisely!

Top-5 needs for online project team collaboration

Today when I reviewed the newest release of Comindwork with tons of features and widgets I suddenly recollected the times when we didn’t have anything for knowledge work collaboration.

Well, I really can not imagine how we would work without any project management system today. I perfectly remember the times (although it was 5 years agooo) when the main tool was just Outlook and its folders with mess of unsorted emails, issues, suggestions, lost decisions and missed milestones.

I think the core needs of the project team didn’t change over last 5 years, although most of today’s project management systems provide much more than really desired. Here is my list of TOP-5 most demanding features for online project management:

• 1. Project blog – without this power of informal communication your project is just dead. This is excellent source for inspiration and place for sharing opinions and news in distributed team.
  2. Email notifications, RSS – you should ensure that every team member is aware about the latest project changes and events. The information should be shared immediately and target people should have 100% guarantee not to miss any critical comments to their tasks or project requirements and schedule.
  3. Bird view dashboard – “1-minute-dashboard to jump into the project context” – ability to review project state and progress during just 1 minute. This is critical for making immediate project decisions or making scheduled project audit.
  4. Project wiki and tagging – the powerful “knowledge shaping”. When we write requirements – we use wiki. We like co-editing wiki-documents as that is simple and powerful way to prepare really mature documentation, help-topics or tips for beginners.
  5. And the 1st prize is… Case (issue) tracking – our biggest challenge was to handle hundreds of small issues which must be tracked until closure and 100% never ignored. In such a situation we create a new case and give the flag to the person who is responsible to resolve the issue. In 2007 year every team player resolved over 200-300 of such cases.

This was the 1st wave of features for Comindwork and they managed to establish basic management discipline and culture in their team. After that the main task was to make the knowledge work truly effective.

Hello world!

Welcome to Online Project Management. I have a lot of experience with online project management tools, so i decided to share it with others, you will aslo find a lot of reviews,  project management tips and more. Stay tooned!