ProjectManagement.com and ProjectsAtWork.com Join the PMI Family

Leading Project Management Organizations Combine to Deliver Expanded Access to Knowledge and Networking

NEWTOWN SQUARE, PA, 13 January 2014 — Project Management Institute (PMI), the world’s leading not-for-profit membership association for the project management profession today announced the acquisition of ProjectManagement.com and ProjectsAtWork.com; two of the largest online resources for project managers and professionals. For more than a decade, both websites have provided project managers with access to a broad range of tools and templates, PMO events and one of the most vibrant and diverse global online communities for professionals in project management. ProjectManagement.com was formerly Gantthead.com.

ESI International Releases Top 10 Trends in Project Management

ESI International, the world's leading project management training company, today announced the release of its top 10 trends in project management for 2014. The 2014 trends reveal that project managers are in increasingly high demand, and are being asked to lead rather than simply manage their teams. Further, the trends highlight the changing nature of project management, as organisations strive for competitive advantage.

“This year’s trends highlight the growing unease with the status quo of current project management practices,” said J. LeRoy Ward, PMP, PgMP, CSM, Executive Vice President, ESI International. “Past failures to improve project efficiencies force the need to ‘pull out all of the stops’ to deal with project complexity, implement new project management approaches, and adopt alternative leadership styles to improve project success for greater competitive advantage. In-demand project managers and leaders seem ready to face the challenge.”

ESI’s top 10 trends for project management include:

Stop using Project Schedules for Resource Management

By Gary L Chefetz

The project management practice that most exemplifies Einstein’s definition of insanity is the use of project schedules as a single basis for measuring and forecasting resource demand across a shared resource pool. While a resource-loaded project schedule can produce interesting and useful data, in reality this data source is highly suspect much of the time. It is time to declare project schedules a perspective in forecasting resource capacity and demand rather than a focal point.

With the perspicuity that more than a decade of watching other people manage projects brings, I can say with strong certainty that most project managers are not very good schedulers, at least not skillful enough to produce the network integrity necessary for a detailed resource-loaded schedule to produce highly reliable predictive work load data. Note that I exclude big projects with dedicated resources, schedulers, and planners. With a team of specialists at hand, supporting your scheduling efforts, you can get great data; but achieving this level of precision is out of reach for the mainstream project manager working in a typical IT department. Not only is it an unrealistic expectation, it is an unnecessary burden.

Project Management Software: a Help or a Hindrance?

By Christopher Stainow

"Project management is like juggling three balls - time, cost and quality. Program management is like a troupe of circus performers standing in a circle, each juggling-three balls and swapping balls from time to time." - G. Reiss

As with so many things in life the use of technology can either make things so much simpler, or that much more complicated. Project management in and of itself is a multi-faceted, intricate process that doesn't need any further difficulties. As such the central idea behind project management software is to facilitate the operation.

Common attributes of Project Management Software

Techopedia provides a good list of the primary functions of project management software:

project planning (mapping project tasks)

task management (the creation and allocation of tasks)

document sharing and collaboration (a central document hub increases productivity)

calendar and contact sharing (meetings, activity dates, calendars etc)

bug and error management (notifies users of erroneous reporting)

time tracking (tracks the time taken for completing tasks)

Of course each function is far more complex than just the examples listed here and TechSoup provides a more in-depth look at each component.