
The supplier presents a service or part concept and customer selects them. The bases for choosing a supplier can vary, as in the following: In some cases, the corporate customer may dictate the choice of suppliers, which can lead to major problems when those suppliers become unreliable. Whether the suppliers are outsourced services or actual manufacturing suppliers, they always remain significant to the project because they participate just as much in the result as any other resource. Build slack into the time line from the start of the program and manage it with great care. Any launch process serves us better than no launch process.ĩ. All of the consensus management areas are the responsibility of the project manager, not just arbitrarily laid out in the schedule.Ĩ. Hard-schedule all gates when the team agrees to take on the business.ħ. Delivery either exists or not (binary).Ħ. Functional managers hold responsibility for task completion.ī. Program managers should manage deliverables not tasks.Ī. The project manager should create plans at as fine a granularity as possible so that the completion of tasks becomes a binary choice and the percentage completion indicator of the Microsoft Project software actually means something.ĥ. Failure to meet the plan equals an annual evaluation issue.Ĥ. If payroll dollars become a touchy topic (e.g., salaries), then use hours as a substitute.ĭ.
Use earned value analysis-supported by Microsoft Project and Primavera Project Planner. Measure plans according to the standard metrics as defined in chapter 15 of Kerzner's Project Management, 8th or 9th edition. All functional managers must deliver a complete plan no later than the planning gate of the project.Ĭ. Alter no plan without exposure at the executive level.ī. Baseline all time lines once the plan has approval.Ī. Use Microsoft Project so that it does not provide an illusory critical path-BEWARE!ģ. Program managers who do not use the term "critical path" unless they understand what it meansĮ. All other tasks connected to at least one other task at the beginning and end of the taskĭ. To calculate a critical path correctly, we must haveĬ. Fix this situation with PERT Chart Pro from, a Project® plug-in.Ģ. Microsoft Project does a poor job of supporting the network diagram.
The network diagram has more importance than the Gantt chart because it more adequately represents the relations of the tasks and deliverables.ī. All time lines belong to a directed graphĪ. We start off this chapter with a tongue-in-cheek collection of "axioms" that sum up some of the more critical realizations we had during numerous projects.ġ. Project Management Tools by Kim Pries and Jon Quigley 1 Delivery Enter E-mail Address: Powered by VerticalResponse