This practical guide to facilitating planning meetings will enable you to effectively jump-start your projects and lead to success. Rigorous planning is vital to your project execution and success. Projects are often multifunctional, requiring input from various stakeholders. Project planning often tends to be done piecemeal or not at all, often leading to missing and/or incomplete information and correspondingly poor results. This book will show you how to do it right. How to Facilitate Productive Project Planning Meetings is a guide to help you plan your projects by showing you how to effectively facilitate productive face-to-face kickoff sessions (both in person and virtual) and ongoing planning meetings. Effective planning meetings will help you not only develop key artifacts but also provide continuous team building. You’ll also learn about the impacts of culture (organizational and global) on team dynamics and discover methods to ameliorate these impacts. A case study of building a sustainable house will help you understand the concepts and grasp the terminology. The book will also feature dozens of illustrative stories (from the authors as well as other practicing project managers) that will illustrate meeting techniques that went well (or not so well). Numerous templates, sample schedules, and checklists round out the value of this book in helping you facilitate effective meetings.

MEET YOUR GOALS—ON TIME AND ON BUDGET. How do you rein in the scope of your project when you’ve got a group of demanding stakeholders breathing down your neck? And map out a schedule everyone can stick to? And motivate team members who have competing demands on their time and attention? Whether you’re managing your first project or just tired of improvising, this guide will give you the tools and confidence you need to define smart goals, meet them, and capture lessons learned so future projects go even more smoothly. The HBR Guide to Project Management will help you: Build a strong, focused team Break major objectives into manageable tasks Create a schedule that keeps all the moving parts under control Monitor progress toward your goals Manage stakeholders’ expectations Wrap up your project and gauge its success

The full text downloaded to your computer With eBooks you can: search for key concepts, words and phrases make highlights and notes as you study share your notes with friends eBooks are downloaded to your computer and accessible either offline through the Bookshelf (available as a free download), available online and also via the iPad and Android apps. Upon purchase, you'll gain instant access to this eBook. Time limit The eBooks products do not have an expiry date. You will continue to access your digital ebook products whilst you have your Bookshelf installed. So, you’ve been asked to manage a project. Not sure where to start? Start here. This is your ultimate one-stop, easy-going and very friendly guide to delivering any project of any size. Even if you’re a first time, never-done-it-before, newbie project manager, How to Manage a Great Project will get you from start to finish on budget, on target and on time.

The PMO Competency Framework is a guide for PMO professionals interested in assessing and developing organisation-wide, team and personal competences within a PMO environment.This publication provides a standard and a toolset to allow PMO professionals to understand, assess and develop the skills, behaviours and experience to achieve their PMO goals and career potential.Aligned with the House of PMO Essentials examinations from APMG International; it serves as an official reference guide for the course

Here are the tools you need to arrange an effective plan and schedule and the techniques necessary to monitor and control your project once it's underway. Following the sequence of how an actual project evolves, the guide also shows you how to handle project costs, deal with labor allocation, and implement the right computer applications for your special needs. This second edition updates the most significant developments and improvements that have occurred in project management over the past few years, helping you ensure more efficient, successful projects from the start. These changes include: the phenomenal growth of the personal computer which has permitted the concept of project management to expand in virtually every type of endeavor...and the current emphasis of participative management and employee involvement (PM/EI) in business and industry. The guide is equally suited for readers from both the academic and professional business worlds.

This book clarifies the differences between plans and schedules, takes the project manager through the process of plan development, and finally, points the way toward successful project execution. Although the terms “plan” and “schedule” are at times used interchangeably, they are in fact very different. A complete project plan contains a project schedule—but it also includes much more than that (e.g., risk management, quality management, human resource management, and procurement). These differences have implications for the layman as well as the experienced project manager and have implications for successful project management practice. Additionally, the contents of the project plan have evolved over time as versions of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) were updated. Due to this, project plans today include important elements that were not included in project planning in the context of earlier versions of the PMBOK and the execution of the project plan requires guidance beyond that which is outlined in the PMBOK framework. The PMBOK emphasizes planning and monitoring and controlling—but very little support is provided for project executing. This begs the question, just what does it mean to execute a project plan?