"During the early stages of a project it is impossible to remember and understand all of the different activities and outputs required to successfully deliver the project. The Work Breakdown Structure enables you to understand the activities whilst the Product Breakdown Structure focuses on the outputs (or products). "
"13. A project manager should visit everyone who is building anything for his project at least once, should know all the managers on his project (both government and contractor), and know the integration team members. People like to know that the project manager is interested in their work, and the best proof is for the manager to visit them and see first hand what they are doing."
"A Work Breakdown Structure is a results-oriented family tree that captures all the work of a project in an organized way. It is often portrayed graphically as a hierarchical tree, however, it can also be a tabular list of "element" categories and tasks or the indented task list that appears in your Gantt chart schedule."
"The advantage of this one over the one on the original post is that you can put actual start and end dates, rather than defining 'week numbers'. I find most stakeholders would rather see actual dates than week numbers."
"My goal with this article is to share good project planning practices which I find to work well in practice. A fundamental difference between agile project planning and traditional project planning is that agile project planning is very collaborative in nature: the team is responsible for planning, not just the project manager."
"One of the greatest challenges we face in the design field is communicating design decisions to other stakeholders (e.g. Business unit, Marketing, Engineering). We’re often forced to attempt this through a requirements document. Personally, I’ve yet to come across a requirements document that is usable and doesn’t take a couple of days to get everyone on the same page. So, we use something different - a task analysis grid"
"Easily create and print a Gantt Chart with this Excel spreadsheet by entering the start date, duration, and percent complete for any number of tasks and subtasks. Add additional tasks by copying and pasting rows. A single chart displays up to 11 months (weekends excluded). A slider bar allows you to easily adjust the range of dates displayed, so that you can create plans spanning a year or more."
"When you break a big project into smaller chunks — into tiny projects — you stand a better chance at maintaining motivation and rekindling interest. When you have a pile of tiny projects you get the chance to work on something new more often. We do our best work when we’re excited about starting something new.
