Project Management Knowledgebase

There is a huge variety of project management applications out there. Most are general purpose apps, not aimed at any one industry. But there are a growing number of project management apps aimed specifically at one industry or another. Applications geared toward creative types are becoming more readily available, and some of the offerings are really quite good.

I love Smashing Magazine. A great resource for anything in digital design! This is a nice article.

Trusted by millions, Basecamp is the leading web-based project management and collaboration tool. To-dos, files, messages, schedules, and milestones.

I had looked at this too. It seems that most PM software ends up having to be paid for. I guess making it free ties to the idea if taking money off the table and using a collaborative organizational model :)

Being a project manager can be a stressful job. You are responsible for a project that business people in your organization care a lot about. Someone may have over-committed you, and is now asking you why you aren't on time, within scope or under budget. You and your staff are working together to find solutions as best you can--but within your organization there is no one you can lean on for answers. This is why we built ProjectManagement.com. Our mission is simple: To make project managers more successful. ProjectManagement.com is the experience bridge that fills in the gaps--providing help to project managers in a number of ways. It is a community, your community, for project managers in Information Technology and other industries.

I've found a number of helpful and informative articles here.

What a great resource! I especially enjoyed the article on "socializing" LMS. We are having this exact discussion at work right now. Thanks for sharing!

Introduction: In order to achieve goals and planned results within a defined schedule and a budget, a manager uses a project. Regardless of which field or which trade, there are assortments of methodologies to help managers at every stage of a project from the initiation to implementation to the closure.

Thanks for posting - it is nice to see a list like this of many of the competing methodologies out there. My interviewee told me that the most important thing prospective PMs can do is learn as many methods as possible as well as possible, because in reality, you need to mix and match them depending on what your project requires, and the more you know, the more you can adapt.

In research and and evaluation these checklists can be incredibly useful. It may be a stretch to apply them to project mgmt for instructional design but there are many links to proposal development that are thought provoking.

Principles to explore with your team.

Basic, but sometimes underutilized, steps to better communication via email.

Definitely good reminders for the workplace! It reminds me of a coworker who had the "reply all" button removed form their email accounts at her previous company because people just couldn't help themselves from over using it. These are good rules to pass around every once in awhile :).

I think we take for granted, because we have all been writing emails for a while, that we know how to make them effective. I would definitely share this at work!

Kirkpatrick's four-level training evaluation model can help you analyze the effectiveness and impact of your training.

Managing scope creep in project management is a challenging job that needs clearly defined, documented and controlled specifications. Scope creep can sneak up, morph and destroy a project.

No matter how great we are at creating learning solutions, we will not even get off the ground without the right content and context. Sometimes, working with SMEs can be one of the most difficult parts of the process. This article provides four great suggestions for how to effectively work with your SME.

I like #2. So many times SMEs loose sight of the project objective. :-)

Jenna, these guidelines are simple but powerful. What of the greatest challenges I had on a recent project was to get the SME to back off and take care of the content, not the learning materials. I never really succeeded but it might have helped if I had the #4 guideline instilled in our heads early in the project.

Project management tools helps your organization to quickly set up and manage projects from start to finish to boost your productivity.

Another list of PM tools with descriptions and user comments.

AWESOME CHART!!!! I really liked how they grouped them together and tried to list the features that were fairly global and unique to each software product.

This was a blog post comparing three different PM Software tools. She makes a point of stating that "These are suggestions for businesses or entrepreneurs that are not focused on development work."

In my search for different PM softwares I came across the following. They do a 30-day trial on all their pricing structures and the website is rather informative.

Simple Smartsheet harnesses the power of a platform within the simplicity of a spreadsheet. No training required - get up and running in minutes. Smart Assign tasks, attach files, share sheets, view timelines, set alerts, create rollups, go mobile, and much more - all with one intuitive tool.