When you manage several projects simultaneously, you have to switch context quite a lot. It's important to have a tool that helps update awareness of the current situation on a particular project. You need a dashboard. Information dashboard, when well designed, is a good means to update situational awareness at …

When you face a problem in your project, don’t get frustrated. Take another perspective: It’s an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to improve yourself or your team. Failure, however painful and stressful, is a resource, so embrace it. Of course, in order for problems to benefit you, you …

As well known, human beings are bad at predicting the future. Having worked on different kinds of projects, I can say that engineers who are supposed to do the project work are reluctant to schedules. Their attitude is rather skeptical. Why trying to predict if the schedule will slip regardless …

We failed to review one piece of the project with a customer before proceeding to the next step, not believing it to be necessary since the project was just beginning and actual deliverables were yet to come. The customer took some time to inspect a deployment model we prepared, because …

I had never been to Portugal before this travel. I knew little about the country, and had no clue what to expect. As a result, my expectations were easily exceeded. I really liked what I saw and experienced there: places, nature, local food, and people! In this post, I'll share …

Pie charts are overly popular and widely used in the business world. However, as Stephen Few puts it in his book “Show me the numbers”, this kind of graphs is not efficient communication tool. He jokes that the author of pie charts, William Playfair, was probably under the weather when …

As many of us would agree, a project manager is responsible for a realistic project schedule. And Gantt chart is a tool that allows PMs to manage schedule in addition to coordinating a team's work. However, here's the challenge I encountered in my work: only PMs are the ones who …

This is my attempt to reflect on events of the year 2016. For that, I'll answer three questions: What went well this year? What could have been done better? What am I working toward? This is a format I decided to use being inspired by the annual reviews by James …

Problem: Imagine you're a managing a project where the constraints like scope, time, cost, and quality have been already negotiated and approved. At some point before the project start, it turns out that a customer wants to change the scope so that a number of test combinations goes significantly up …

Multitasking is a feature of the microprocessor not a human's. In the world surrounded by computer technologies, multitasking is something quite natural. Opening multiple tabs with different resources in a browser. Chatting with several people at a time. Sending an email when on a web conference call. Does it sound …