Project Management Knowledgebase

Site with blogs on numerous interesting topics. Here's one blogger's tips on project management.

This site outlines the basics of project management. I especially liked the matrix that compared four commonly used tools in project planning and project management for identifying the strengths and uses of each.

businessballs.com has tons of information on many different topics including project mangement

This site does have a ton of information.. It also provided me with a TQM flashback!

An organization focused on helping individuals grow their PM skills - offering learning opportunities, professional development, networking, resources, certification and other related items.

I liked this discussion about making a budget.

Hi Peggy. Sorry I didn't know about this link before I began the Cost Analysis for our team project. Thanks for the information.

It's so true that not all costs can be measured in dollars.

Like good manners and good grammar, body language is a tool for expressing your "best" self in a certain situation.

This URL was located during our class discussion on ethical practices for instructional designers of eLearning. Includes university policy, a video explaining "fair use" and guidelines for students and professor.

This review published in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education examines "examines the foundations of the definitions of emotional intelligence as well as existing educational research involving emotional intelligence, both within the health professions and externally." What I found most helpful was the Summary of Emotional Intelligence Research Trials.

It might be possible to build upon your recent class INTE 5160, "Managing Information and Learning Technology Programs". The University of Colorado offers a non-degree PM certification program. This web page provides the information.

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.

This site is tremendous for doing a lot of very cool things in Excel. Any time I have a new project, I always check in here to see if there is anything that can help me get my information into a eye catching and user friendly format.

Nice - thanks! Looks like this has tons of useful information for a huge number of things. And I'm psyched if a product I already have and know how to use can also address project management needs pretty well...

John, I have been dissatisfied until now about what Excel templates I could find for Project Management. This site really fills in the blanks for me. I know Excel extremely well but still found this quite useful!

An entertaining YouTube video that lists the project stages of an eLearning project.View this at the beginning of the course. It could really help you (at a high level) in completing the final project proposal.

The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) is a non-profit association for workplace learning and performance professionals. They describe this certification program as "...presents concrete steps to improve your project management skills. Participants will learn to manage the critical project management role helping deliver learning and performance solutions that better support their business goals."

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.

Great concise article on conflict management with specific strategic tips. The goal is not just to resolve conflict, but rather to work through conflict toward a productive outcome.

Great article. I love the very first point - finding the common goal to concentrate on, and using your empathy to approach your adversary as you would a friend.

Here is a nice article on emotional intelligent. I like the topic very much.

Peggy, this is a great article and definitely something I can use in my workplace. I think acknowledging how teams deal with and use EI is great in helping create strong interpersonal relationships. Thank you for sharing!

I appreciate this too. One of the things I was curious about after our EI discussions was how best to share knowledge of EI, self-awareness and empathetic communication with team members. It seems to me that rather than just using the techniques we have learned ourselves, we should share them with others as well, so that they understand the approach and the improved empathy is able to move both ways. So this is great to have some advice about that specifically.

Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) is an alternate method of planning and managing projects with an emphasis on the resources required to execute project tasks rather than upon what the traditional WBS encapsulates.

This was interesting! I liked all of the statistics about why projects fail. Being new to all this, it gives me further insight on structuring projects.

Wow, it is hard to believe how many different methodologies there are out there! This one seems really different. I can see how it would be suited for some types of projects, like those with a tangible end product, but I wonder how well it would work with eLearning?

Michael Greer's site that composes a list of questions as the project moves along. It starts with identifying lessons learned from other projects in order for the team to be refreshed for the new project.

I liked the idea of preparing responses in advance of a face-to-face meeting. That gives people the opportunity to reflect and provide quality answers.

These are good suggestions, but I think it would be even better to also instruct team members to jot down issues and solutions as they come up. I find that when we wait for a debrief after one of our huge events, many of us recall some of the problems that came up over the past months, but not all. There have been many times we've sat there looking at each other saying "what was that thing we had to deal with a few months back?" Sometimes we remember, sometimes we don't. Or conversely, we remember the problem, but didn't document exactly how we solved it and have to recreate the solution in the following year's event. So definitely something to be said for documenting feedback in the heart of the matter rather than in a recap, and reviewing the list in the recap meeting rather than trying to reconstruct it then.

Cost overruns on a new Veterans Affairs hospital on the Fitzsimons campus seem to indicate fundamental blunders in oversight. Mismanagement leads to a 67% cost overrun and project not near completion.

A 67% cost overrun and the project still not completed is absolutely outrageous!

Ouch. I work on the Fitz campus and was wondering what was taking them so long. Bad!

The very cool IDEO methodology Kenny mentioned in a discussion during our course: It is a mindset Design Thinking is the confidence that everyone can be part of creating a more desirable future, and a process to take action when faced with a difficult challenge. That kind of optimism is well needed in education.

The object of The Project Management Game is to assign the best staff to particular tasks and complete your project on-time and under budget. This is definitely not Call of Duty, but it's free. Here's a more realistic PM game, but you have to purchase: http://www.sharkworldgame.nl/

Cute!