In the last few weeks we have seen numerous clients and other organizations move to having their workers work from home. For some of these organizations this has been a smooth and seamless transition. For others not so much. As we’ve described on our blog in my own firm HMS, the move from working on premise to working remotely has been very easy but this is because we had already put a plan in place…
It’s probably no surprise but thanks to the current situation with Covid-19, some of the project management conferences that I had been asked to speak at have been postponed or changed. The ProjectSummit*BAWorld Orlando which had been scheduled for April 6-8th has been postponed to October 26-28. I’ll still be speaking at the event, it’ll just be later. For more information on the event, go to: https://www.pmbaconferences.com/orlando/home.html. UT Dallas PM Symposium 2020 which had been…
Managing projects remotely used to be an oxymoron but over the last 20 years, creating a project team that is not co-located has slowly brought project managers into a world where they may only see their team face-to-face rarely. With the advent of Covid-19 and restrictions on movement around the world, project management at a distance has become an essential skill. For some project managers who are new to such management, they may tend to…
This article appeared last year in the PM World Journal and was based on a presentation I got to give at the University of Texas at Dallas PM Symposium. For some reason, I never posted the article directly so here is “Resource Risk in an Uncertain World”. Life is risky. Thank goodness. If not for the presence of risk, what would we need project managers for? We’d just make an estimate and return on the…
This collection of tips and techniques on project management has been put together by my long-standing friend and colleague David Barrett. Keys to Our Success is 29 chapters from 29 different perspectives about real life business challenges for project management. I was privileged to write the chapter called “Between the Tasks”. The book will go on sale January 24th on what Amazon calls “Blitz Day”. I encourage you to take a look at: http://tiny.cc/fhqkiz. …
In the EPM industry we tend to talk about Enterprise without much consideration that it may be considered differently by different people or at different times. Many people think of an enterprise as something that applies only to large multi-national publicly traded companies. Others might think of an enterprise as a broad collection of organizations or companies. This is one of the first questions I ask when speaking to an organization who is interested in…
I’ve been focusing a lot of my project management and timesheet conceptual energies lately on looking beyond what happens in each project task in a day and looking between them to everything else that happens in a day. That has led me to numerous subjects that I’ll talk about in the coming months. The project management industry has put enormous focus on being more efficient in task management over the last 6 or 7 decades. …
“We need to improve our resource management,” is a phrase I’ve often heard yet answer it requires finding out exactly what the person meant when they said it. When we look at the resource aspect of project management, there are multiple perspectives. I would put resource management loosely into three main categories: Can we do it? How do we do it? Who will do it? Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.…
It’s been some time since I attended the annual Microsoft Partner Conference now called Inspire. But this is the year! I will be at Inspire on July 15th and 16th and would be delighted to meet any of our HMS partners and alliance members. If you are going to be there, let me know here on the website or at: chris.vandersluis@hms.ca.
I’m looking forward to being back in Dallas next week. On Tuesday, May 21st, I will be speaking at the 13th Annual UT Dallas Project Management Symposium at the UT Dallas Campus. This is a big event and I’m delighted to have been asked to speak there. My topic is “Managing Resource Risk in an Uncertain World”. If you plan to attend the conference, please make sure to say hello.
