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Showing posts from May, 2012

Project Management Alerts 05.28.2012

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These News Alerts relating to Project Management just happened to come to my attention this morning, and I wanted to share them with our readers. - Douglas E. Castle ---------------- BOT International Honors Ricardo Ferrero of Baker Hughes with PMO Manager ... Virtual-Strategy Magazine "The PMO Manager Leadership Award recognizes individuals that have not just excelled at implementing project management methodology and tools, but that have also excelled in the demonstration of business acumen and enterprise leadership in the ... See all stories on this topic » PMI founder charts winning course Ultimate Pasadena by Paul R. Kopenkoskey | May 28, 2012 9:12 am AJ Collier first became a member of the non-profit Project Management Institute when he joined the Los Angeles chapter in 1972. AJ Collier estimates he's cruised to Cozumel, Mexico , at least 20 times. See all stories on this topic » IFRS RPP Project Manager Here Is The City A Project Manager role in the Change the

Cost Creep! How Budgets Balloon. - Overruns And Missed Deadlines

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A budget is a matrix of objectives in terms of cost, tasks, certain quality parameters and time frames. It is not a best-case , worst-case or most probably case scenario, a forecast to wow investors or a means at winning a contract. A budget is a rule book. Any deviation from budget (i.e., a negative variance) is something that emerges from any of the following sources of error. And these errors lead to missed deadlines, cost overruns , and quality control deficiencies if: 1 ) A budget is created as selling tool or as a means of winning financing or a contract; 2 ) A budget does not provide sufficient margin for contingencies and other critical path issues, interruptions and deviations from trajectory; 3 ) A budget is put together with the thought in mind that once the project is sufficiently underway, the client, investor or manager will be sufficiently emotionally invested that he or she will not regard the project as a failure, and that additional resources (such as time and fund

IT: Aging Infrastructure's Hidden Costs - Don't Be Fooled...

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Left-click to see a much larger version of the embedded image . FUTURAMA! Following are 5 fabulous downloadable whitepapers from the IT Whitepapers Newsletter , an excellent source of information relating to IT, project management and program management . While the orientation of the information is decidedly (and appropriately) technical, just skimming through these summaries offers meaningful insight into emerging technologies, cost-benefit analyses of various IT solutions and data center and data communications, storage, security and backup management. The article which immediately hooked me concerned the hidden costs of retaining (patching and pasting, duct-taping and bandaging) aging IT systems in order to "continue to squeeze out productivity without making any further capital investment or incurring any further expense for as long as possible. At first blush, this would seem to make sense, but the hidden costs, while piling up and steeply increasing with time and technol

7 Keys To Maximum Profitability - For Business Planners, Project Managers, And Other Successfully-Inclined Individuals

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Maximizing profits (within ethical, legal and quality control parameters) is one of the very fundamental objectives of an for-profit enterprise. Yes, we'd like to build value for stakeholders, mitigate and contain risk, and meet other objectives -- but none of these can be attained without profit maximization . As a working tool for any professional involved in either starting, building or improving a business, I have distilled a rather extensive process into seven simple keys. While this list is by no means all-inclusive, it provides what I believe is an excellent analytic, evaluative and planning framework. These keys may be customized to suit the particular needs of your enterprise or industry sector . We aren't speaking of Six Sigma or anything else which is technical or which requires significant training and possible certification. We are just utilizing common sense (logic) and a systematic means of organization. If the table which follows seems elementary to you, that