Construction Management Guide

Projects don’t always go through an organized sequence of planning, approval and execution. Sometimes a project is in various stages at once. Before you know it, you can be executing the project and find that team members and stakeholders have varying levels of understanding about the purpose and status of the project. Just as a project should have a formal end-of-project meeting to signify that it is complete, it also makes sense to hold a formal kickoff meeting to start a project. (Read more..)

Efficiency and effectiveness are key to the smooth functioning of an organization and can be achieved if work is properly planned and delegated. Before you start your work, take some time to plan. These plans should be flexible so that you can adapt them to different situations. However, you should ensure that details do not slow down your work. Here are some tips: (Read more..)

In a large project, there may be many people that have some role in the creation and approval of project deliverables. Sometimes this is pretty straightforward, such as one person writing a document and one person approving it. In other cases, there may be many people who have a hand in the creation and others that need to have varying levels of approval. (Read more..)

Tutorial 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRpwaM0-puk (Read more..)

The Requirements Management Plan describes how you will elicit, analyze, document and manage the requirements of the project. This plan will cover the up-front gathering of high-level project and product requirements, as well as the more detailed product requirements that you will collect during the project lifecycle. (Read more..)

The Staffing Management Plan describes your overall approach for acquiring and managing human resources on your project. The types of information to include in this plan include: (Read more..)

Most people are aware of a Value Proposition and Business Case. The purpose of the Value Proposition document is to define the overall benefits and costs of a project at a very high level. The Business Case document allows you to provide much more diligence on the costs and benefits, while still not requiring you to actually go through the effort of chartering the work at this time. (Read more..)

At the completion of a major project milestone or phase, the team should take a short pause to ensure that the prior work was completed successfully and that the project team and the client are ready to proceed to the next major phase. Here are some of the activities in the phase gate review meeting. (Read more..)

Sometimes when you try to resolve a problem, you find that what you thought was a root cause is really a related symptom, not the actual cause of the problem itself. Consider the following classic example. (Read more..)

The project approach is a section in the Project Charter that describes in words the thinking that goes into the creation of the project schedule. There are two benefits to creating an approach section. First, this information will help the client and stakeholders understand how the project will progress without having to interpret the actual schedule. (Read more..)