No one is a Project Management robot. Especially when you’re a battle hardened Project Manager, you have probably picked up a few bad habits. The Project Management Institute Methodology can be an intimidating beast. If you’re looking at upping your game by integrating PMI best practices into your own practice, there are baby steps you can take that bring some benefits of PMI to your door on your terms. Small changes can have a huge impact on your practice.

PERT estimation

I’ve talked about using estimation in the planning phase. PERT is the one where you take an optimisitic, pessimistic, and most likely estimate for a final estimate, variance and statistical deviation.

Stakeholder Management

If nothing else, realizing that the project sponsors is the make or break, the team is the engine who gets it done and you need their buy in, and cooperation, and being able to loop them in and manage them effectively can make your job exponentially easier and your project more successful.

Lessons Learned and Post Mortems

This is an oft overlooked tool. It’s human nature to be excited to hightail it out of the last project and into the next, and given that it’s not a task on the critical path for delivery, and often not even a deliverable for the client, it’s extremely easy to say “Nuts to that! I’m not doing it!” It is a very good tool to use to influence future practice.
I’ve heard it said that learning from mistakes is what separates a god project manager from a crappy one. What’s the best way to learn from your own bone headedness than to spend a little time after the fact in a no-blame inquiry can provide you with a forum to accept some very valuable take aways for your future practice.

Burn Rate Analysis

Ability to track the cost with CPI and schedule with SVI are the easiest and most extensively relevant formulae. (others would be ETC, EAC, BAC, etc… but they may not have the same level of pertinence). CPI and SVI are simple, straight forward and singular numbers that you can use to diagnose the health of your projects. If performed on an ongoing basis, you can track if a project is going off the rails while underway.

Critical Path

Diagraming the Critical Path is not necessarily always relevant, but understanding the concept of the critical chain and being able to juggle things around that have necessary dependencies on one another can be a useful tool when the client says “We still have that hard deadline of February 15, but we can’t sign off on the BRD until a month later than we planned…”. Critical path tools include fast tracking and crashing of course.