Category: Project Execution

  • Principles to Remember for Better Requirements Management

    To help you develop better requirements and improve your ability to manage both requirements and expectations throughout the project, review the following principles: Guidelines for Better Requirements To avoid the common problems identified earlier and greatly increase your requirements definition prowess, note these guidelines: The Absolute Minimum At this point, you should have a solid…

  • Essential Elements of Managing Expectations

    Let’s take a look at the essential tools and techniques that are available to the project manager to effectively manage stakeholder expectations. Project Planning and Control Elements—A Quick Review At many times during the on defining, planning, and controlling a project, we referenced managing expectations as a key reason or benefit of specific project management…

  • Seven Master Principles of Expectations Management

    Now that you have a good feel for the breadth of managing expectations, you can understand the value of many key project planning and project control fundamentals. Before we do a quick encapsulation of those items and then delve into two other powerful tools for managing expectations—requirements management and kickoff meetings—let’s look at the seven…

  • Critical Aspects of Expectations

    If you are going to attempt to influence something, you first need to know what makes up that “something.” For expectations, there is one key concept and four critical components that need to be understood for effective management. Balancing Reality and Perception The key concept is that expectations are shaped by both reality and perception.…

  • Introduction

    Do you believe that managing stakeholders’ expectations is nothing more than properly managing project scope? Do you believe that managing stakeholders’ expectations is nothing more than effective project communications? Do you believe that every project is successful that completes on time and on budget? If you answered yes to any of these questions. Value of…

  • Best Practices of Effective Project Communicators

    To better understand these communication principles and improve your communication abilities, let’s review the common best practices used by effective project communicators. We’ll look at general communications management, status reports, conducting meetings, interpersonal skills, and the best use of the common communication media. General Communications Management First, review the best practices of general project communications…

  • Seven Powerful Principles

    Let’s take a look at the seven key principles employed by most effective project communicators:  Caution In organizations with standard project reports, don’t assume these meet the information needs of your individual stakeholders. Be willing to adjust to better meet their needs.

  • Why Communicating Can Be Tough

    Before we review key principles and best practices, let’s make sure we understand why we cannot take communications for granted. On one hand, we know instinctively that there are many factors that impact the communications process—primarily because we live it every waking minute. On the other hand, many of us don’t seem to incorporate this…

  • The Importance of Project Communications

    Project communications are not only important for the obvious reason—keeping individual stakeholders properly and consistently informed on the status, progress, and impact of the project—they are a determinant factor to the overall success of the project. Why is this? Here are a few key reasons:

  • What Are Project Communications?

    The communications of a project include all means and manners by which the project interacts with all its stakeholders. This not only includes the standard, formal communication items such as It can also include organizational change management communications, such as Although the nature of your individual project (number and type of stakeholders, location of stakeholders,…