Tag Archives: templates

Build better templates and improve your life

A bold statement? Perhaps. But if you use effective templates in your projects and operational activities, you can save hours of work each week.  And who couldn’t use a few free hours each week? Most templates are set up with … Continue reading

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Manage Your Portfolio of Problems Part 1

Does your team and organization suffer from numerous problems and issues?  Do more issues crop up each time you try to solve something? Managing your problems as a portfolio may help you. One of the keys to improving your team … Continue reading

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Managing Suppliers Effectively to Deliver Your Project Objectives – Quality and Assessment

I was recently asked about an effective method to manage multiple suppliers on a project.  The client had a number of potential suppliers to engage and wanted to know the best approach to ensure the suppliers deliver what was required. … Continue reading

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Preparing for a Project Sponsor Meeting

Sponsors are critical to almost all projects.  They’re the people who get budgets approved, they’re the ones who provide the energy and impetus for getting the business ready for the project. Yet PMs often seem to treat them like they’re … Continue reading

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Top 15 Business Improvement Items for the New Year

The following is a list we put together to get someone started in improving their business. Hope you find it useful – they certainly did! 1. Do you have a consolidated list of your current projects?  Is it clear how … Continue reading

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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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Filed under alignment, appraisals, attitude, audits, checklist, CMMI, Effectiveness & Efficiency, executive, improvement, innovation, ISO9001, leadership, manager, method, organization change, PMO, problems, process improvement, productivity, project management, startup, strategy, structure, templates

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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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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Project Kickoffs Improve Performance

I was recently asked about why project kickoffs are important – surely people could just read the Project Management Plan and Project Charter. Nice in theory – rather more difficult in practice.  It’s always better to get everyone in a … Continue reading

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A Day in Refactoring Agile Project Process Part 2

12.30 Lunch We have a great lunch at Tokio’s in Melbourne CBD.  The team highly recommended it as fantastic for the sukiyaki-don and other specialties.  Sounded good and they were right – it was a great experience.  We have a … Continue reading

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Filed under agile, appraisals, audits, CMMI, improvement, innovation, ISO9001, method, organization change, people, PMO, problems, process improvement, startup, strategy, templates