Category: Project Management

Why do so many projects deliver late and how do we avoid it? Eliyahu Goldratt in his book Critical Chain, observed that when we give estimates we often secretly add some padding to the figure. This is our safety margin, because we all confuse the word estimate with commitment. Now you might think that in […]

In the first part of this Introduction, I talked about some of the basic use of a Gantt chart and some of the essential features. I will expand on both of those in this post. To help make that easier, I have edited the Gantt chart from last time. (It is a Public Domain image […]

In this article I will look at two useful planning techniques: creating Gantt Charts and creating Burndown Charts. Both have their pluses and minuses. Gantt Charts were named after Henry Gantt, who invented them in the early part of the twentieth century. Burndown Charts are often used in agile environments to track the progress of […]

In my first semester in engineering school in the mid-1970s I, along with a cadre of incoming prospective engineering students, took a course that covered a plethora of engineering topics. One portion of that class actually dealt with project management and Gantt and PERT charts. At the time they seemed like topics one had to […]

The Great Project Management Myth There is a fallacy in the project management sector that an initiative’s success or failure boils down to processes. However, PRINCE2 and other contemporary process management frameworks are only tools in a project manager’s toolkit. The reality is that process must be aligned with talent, culture and creativity to put […]