Project Management Secrets: The Experts Tell All!

In this Book

• Project Management Secrets—The experts tell all!
• Good project management is vital to business success
• Projects are not tasks
• Understand project constraints
• Understand the project life cycle
• Know your stakeholders
• See your stakeholders’ points of view
• Choose the right approach
• ‘The buck stops here’
• Every masterpiece starts with a sketch
• Get creative!
• SOC it to them!
• Sell the benefits
• Build support
• Define your objectives
• Divide the project into work packages
• First things first (and last things last)
• Build a project timetable
• Add contingency and use it wisely
• Match people to tasks
• Organize and control your project
• Manage risks wisely
• ‘Design in’ quality
• Understand the role of finance
• Estimate project costs
• Choose to insource or outsource
• Choose the right supplier
• Negotiate the right type of contract
• Make a return on your investment
• Freeze the project budget
• Control costs
• Design in success to your project team
• Understand team dynamics
• Make the most of matrix working
• Tailor your leadership style
• Communication is more than just words
• Learn to manage difficult conversations
• Manage yourself, then the project
• Plan for change
• Create an open culture
• Get results from team meetings
• Get the data
• Create a balanced project scorecard
• There’s a solution to every problem
• Be lucky!
• Know when it’s closing time
• Achieve closure
• Plan to evaluate
• Choose what to measure
• Measure the true return on investment
• Evaluation is a listening exercise
• Never stop learning
• Jargon buster
• Further reading