Project Management Companion

Capacity planning is a process that balances the available hours of teams against what the project needs. Capacity in this case is the most work that can be done over a certain time frame. It can be a delicate balancing act as there could be several items needing attention at once, such as the availability of the team, the money in the budget for those hours and what is demanded by the client, stakeholder or customer. Planning is how one schedules the hours of the team members so that the work gets done in time. The first question to address when planning for capacity within an organization is whether or not there is any capacity, or the resources, to do the work. Regardless of the situation, the information will not be worth much unless there is a way to measure and track these resources, such as a  resource management tool . Only then can an educated decision on capacity planning be made. It’s a matter of supply and demand, are the resources available? Those resources ...

The current project is coming to an end, and with it your contract, or possibly it’s time for another challenge elsewhere. Regardless of the reason it’s time to refine the resume to nail that next role. So what is required to standout from all those competitors, it is hard to come by important decisions that are made in the absence of data to support them. Managers are, understandably, loath to not have evidence stacked up to support a claim or decision that exposes their organization to opportunity, but also risk.  This same perspective can be applied to hiring decisions as well. Are not employees a huge opportunity, albeit potential risk, for any business? A star employee can transform an organization for the better, resulting in a strong bottom line and happier customers. In a competitive job market, candidates need to sell their attributes and accomplishments to hiring managers, who increasingly need to base their hiring decisions on strong evidence, not unlike other o...

By the nature of the work that Project Managers and Scrum Masters do, the two are not particularly closely aligned, even if it seems at first glance that they are. Managing a project is not the same as being a Scrum Master. Scrum Masters have the role of mentoring, teaching, coaching and facilitating, while the role of the Project Manager is to ensure that the project runs to time and budget. This means that the Scrum Master relies on more of the so-called “soft skills” involved with helping people to move forward, while the Project Manager takes a more methodical, and arguably more of a “hard skills” approach. While both roles have an interest in ensuring a high level of team performance and driving efficiency within the team, the ways in which they go about this are very different. The Scrum Master facilitates and coaches, while the Project Manager assesses risk and manages issues and conflicts.  Looking closer at what Project Managers and Scrum Masters do in terms of ...