Tag Archives: reviews

Do you really need a Project Management Office? (PMO effectiveness metrics)

Why do you have a Project Management Office? What do they do? What value do they add to the company?  Is that their opinion or the business’? If you have a clear definition of your PMO, go and ask some … Continue reading

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Improve project efficiency and effectiveness by dealing with quality – Part 1

Despite industry efforts over decades of work, many projects and project managers have difficulties in managing quality. Quality management as a discipline has been with us for a long time.  The two best known project management methods – PMBOK and … Continue reading

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Filed under agile, audits, checklist, CMMI, defects, Effectiveness & Efficiency, improvement, ISO9001, ISO9126, KPI, manager, method, metrics, peer reviews, people, PMO, process improvement, product quality, productivity, project management, quality, software quality, structure, templates

How to improve your productivity by using structure in your process

Once an organization reaches a certain size (say more then 30 people) it makes sense to set up a little bit of structure behind the way things are done. You often hear the objection “but we don’t need procedures or … Continue reading

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Compliance versus Support – The Chicken and the Egg

To bring some structure and consistency to projects (and business processes in general), audits or QA checks/gates are often performed to assess current practices and to enforce consistency.  But in one of the great ironies, it is often necessary to … Continue reading

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How to get promoted in 24 steps

There are a lot of books and many lengthy articles about how to get promoted.  But rather than read through hours and hours of theoretical material, here are 24 ideas that will help you get promoted.  Figure out if there … Continue reading

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Experiences Reviewing KPI/metric Efficiency Part 2 of 2

C. What data is collected automatically (including tool integration) The only data collected automatically was the defects.  A Microsoft Access based tool was used to record and track defects encountered on the project. Everything else was recorded on paper and … Continue reading

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Experiences Reviewing KPI/metric Efficiency Part 1 of 2

I’ve spoken a lot about metrics in the past and I was asked by a client to go through the steps involved in reviewing the efficiency of metrics with examples. Using our checklists is cool, but he also wanted some … Continue reading

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Filed under alignment, CMMI, defects, improvement, ISO9001, ISO9126, KPI, metrics, organization change, people, process improvement, product quality, risk, ROI, software quality

Improve Your Business With A Quality Management System Review

Once in a while it’s good to review your quality/business management system (structure, processes, requirements, etc) – we’ll focus on processes for the moment.  The relevance of processes is critical.  They must be useful to your staff, customers, partners and … Continue reading

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Peer Reviews Improve Product Quality and Project Delivery

Shock! They actually work! Peer reviews are an effective tool to improve the quality of deliverables – be they documents, code, tests, presentations, etc.  Yet they are still not used in many companies. Why not? People don’t have the “time” … Continue reading

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Filed under CMMI, defects, improvement, ISO9001, KPI, method, metrics, organization change, peer reviews, people, problems, process improvement, product quality, project management, ROI, software quality, Uncategorized

Practical Steps To Recover From a Project Failure (Project Disaster Recovery)

One of the most difficult things to do is to recovery from project disasters – you know the sort – where EVERYTHING that can go wrong does go wrong. There are four key activities to undertake when recovering from any … Continue reading

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