After more than 1 year and 32 posts, I say good by to my reader. I have other priorities now and won’t have time anymore to publish great articles here.
This was my first blog and it learns me a lot of things, as commitment to a task, sharing datas and trying to help other people.
Good bye 
– Geoffrey
Finally I arrived at the last post of the PM Toolbox series. This one is about how to be sure to stick to the budget in term of time and cost and the tool we will use for this purpose is the S-curves method.
Different methods exist to manage risks. You can use an Iskikawa diagrams and root cause analysis in a prospective way, as well as PERT chart.
But I will talk about another way to manage risks based on a graph, inspired by Mintzberg, that prioritizes tasks by order of importance and urgency. This way, you get a cartography of risks based on their probability and their criticality.
Gantt Chart, that inherit its name from its inventor Henry Laurence Gantt, an American mechanical engineer, is a very good tool to follow the evolution of a project.
Complex projects require a series of activities, some of which must be performed sequentially and others that can be performed in parallel with other activities. This collection of series and parallel tasks can be modeled as a network.
In 1957 the Critical Path Method (CPM) was developed as a network model for project management. CPM is a deterministic method that uses a fixed time estimate for each activity. While CPM is easy to understand and use, it does not consider the time variations that can have a great impact on the completion time of a complex project.
With constant growth in customers expectation in term of quality, cost and delivery, you can’t focus on all areas of a project. You have to choose what is critical and what is trivial.
In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth.
Things go wrong… that’s just a fact of life. To paraphrase the infamous bumper sticker, “Stuff” happens. In the world of software projects, that stuff consists of bugs (software defects), bad/unclear requirements, missed delivery dates, inappropriate expectations and so forth. And when those things go wrong, all too frequently, the symptoms end up getting treated, only to return in the future when the real problem manifests itself again.
Root Cause Analysis helps you to think through causes of a problem thoroughly. Their major benefit is that they push you to consider all possible causes of the problem, rather than just the ones that are most obvious. So you treat the real problem, not only symptoms.
Diagnose origin of a problem, organize tasks, define priorities… That’s all the missions a project manager has to assume. To simplify daily life, methods exist : Ishikawa’s diagram, PERT, Pareto’s law…
I’ll write a set of post to show you the toolbox of a project manager. Posts will be about :
During the month of january, I’ve migrated the blog to a new hosting service, because I was facing to much problem with the previous one (free but far from perfect).
Now I can focus on writing new and inspiring article about productivity, iphone and other great stuff.
Stay tuned !
– Geoffrey
I’m taking some vacations and spend time with my family. Thus I won’t post until January 2010.
So I wish a happy, healthy new year to everyone. Please be safe, enjoy yourselves, and remember the best parts in people you know and help make 2010 better than 2009 in your part of the world.
– Geoffrey