Thursday, February 7, 2013

Project Management Gems

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Active Collab®

is a site that I found a year ago for my department when we were exploring how to manage, document, and communicate the progress on the various projects within our diverse group.  As Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, and Kramer state in their book on project management, “projects that are particularly complex, challenging, or uncertain are often first to minimize the importance of planning, monitoring, and controlling effort so the team can focus on the ‘real work’ of the project” (2008, p. 318).  Active Collab® is a terrific tool for quickly planning out projects via milestones, tasks, and tickets.  For an organization this is useful in that a project manager can assign tasks with due dates to certain members and those assignees can document progress, time spent on task, notes, and digital evidence of completion.  Along with the online site was an iPhone App that we used for mobile updates to our projects.  Although the product was stellar, the implementation was not planned thoroughly, leaving inconsistent management of the project documentation. We have since phased out this site in our work, but it was because of a need for the basics of project management rather than an issue with the program.




ProjectMinds 

is a resource found while researching this week for assistance with planning, budgeting, and resource allocation.  Dr. Stolovich in a multimedia program entitled “Creating a Resource Allocation Plan” shared, that it is essential for the project manager to plan resources realistically and it can be difficult to know what different budget items are correct (Stolovich, n/d).  The Project Minds site breaks down the various components of project management and provides resources to help the novice at just the right place to be useful.  Additionally, I found even more information shared by those in the field on their resources page.  Throughout my current work, I have been implementing each step of the project management process with my spring project assignments and I often do not have my project management book at hand.  This site has provided “just in time” information accessible from a mobile device or my laptop.

References:

  
Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., &
Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

 

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