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Nope. I mean Planner
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Jan 14, 2020 04:43
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Heners_UK posted:Nope. I mean Planner Oh neat. Yea definitely agree with the MS Paint analogy. REST API looks straightforward though if you need to autogen from a template or something.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:30
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Planner fails at trying to be Jira and doesn't come close to being good for project management. I've found really only useful for managing small tasks across a small team. I'm sorry you have to use it.
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Jan 15, 2020 02:10
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Higgy posted:Planner fails at trying to be Jira and doesn't come close to being good for project management. I've found really only useful for managing small tasks across a small team. I'm sorry you have to use it. Yeah planner is a worse trello. The only thing it has going for it is all the built in tie ins to 365 for your own task management. Thank god I was able to talk my company out of not using it as a PM solution.
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Jan 15, 2020 13:42
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planner does tie well into microsoft to-do, teams, and sharepoint so if your org is deep on the office stack it can be good we are but everyone uses jira and is pretty happy with that if your org drinks a particular kool-aid you might need more specialized software, for example our manufacturing org uses some custom built six sigma project mgmt. software so they don't have to do statistics on their own if your org has powerpoint poisoning like mine think-cell is a really good tool for making complex gantt charts to hide your agile project in something that looks like waterfall to soothe your execs who last learned about project management in 1988
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Jan 15, 2020 14:28
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I created a taskboard using Planner because my org is deep into Teams and SharePoint. Now it's been colored and used for everything in the organization so it's an unwieldy mess. Probably should have used Jira but I had no idea what I was doing and Planner works well enough when you keep things simple.
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Jan 16, 2020 04:26
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We use jira and primavera p6 depending on the flavor of project. P6 can be an unwieldy beast without proper training though, it’s insanely powerful and data driven but that also means it has a thousand settings and calculations for our entry level project controls folks to gently caress up and have me reporting the wrong ETCs for a quarter to my client. No I’m not mad why do you ask?
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Jan 16, 2020 05:40
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Wrike is my favorite project management tool I have used so far. I've implemented it in two organizations. It was originally created for marketing and creative projects, but I've found it to be very useful for IT as well. It doesn't necessarily offer features you can't find in other tools, but the sum is greater than its parts I guess you could say. It is very easy to learn and very powerful once you've learned how all its features work together and can be used.
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Jan 16, 2020 05:47
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As far as the PMP cert is concerned, what is the definition of leading a project At my current place, myself and the other PM are also the spec writers. He tends to be the primary on that (like a 75-25 split) where as I run our day to day task management, scheduling, resource management, aligning dependencies, clearing blockers, stakeholder management, etc for all the projects, even ones that I did not write requirements for. For things I did not write specs for, my name isn't going to appear on any documentation, quality documents, etc. Our PM hours are not logged anywhere at all for any of those tasks.
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Jan 16, 2020 13:03
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They will not care, they just want you to take their class and pay for the exam.
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Jan 16, 2020 15:03
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THE MACHO MAN posted:As far as the PMP cert is concerned, what is the definition of leading a project sure sounds like a bunch of bitch work to keep the project on track as in that sounds like managing and leading a project to me also spwrozek posted:They will not care, they just want you to take their class and pay for the exam.
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Jan 17, 2020 01:01
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THE MACHO MAN posted:As far as the PMP cert is concerned, what is the definition of leading a project At my job the other PM would be called a PM, and your job would be the next tier down, a scheduler or more formally a project coordinator. Not saying it's not still a leading aspect of a project of course.
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Jan 17, 2020 01:18
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spwrozek posted:They will not care, they just want you to take their class and pay for the exam. yeah, I figured. I don't even know if I particularly feel like going through the headache, but it seems like at least half the places I am looking at prefer it or outright require it thanks guys
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Jan 17, 2020 02:19
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THE MACHO MAN posted:yeah, I figured. I don't even know if I particularly feel like going through the headache, but it seems like at least half the places I am looking at prefer it or outright require it It's worth it. For a PM it is more valuable dollar/career wise than an MBA for waaaay less $ and effort. I've found that to be true.
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Jan 17, 2020 04:37
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D-Pad posted:It's worth it. For a PM it is more valuable dollar/career wise than an MBA for waaaay less $ and effort. I've found that to be true. Agreed, he should do it for sure. Just realize that it is generally BS.
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Jan 17, 2020 06:06
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Does anyone have a good source of PDUs? I used the PM-Podcast for my last cycle to listen in my commute and basically took care of my whole requirement but I’m always looking for other sources. I figure I should get a head start with one year left on my next cycle....surely next time will be different right?
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Jan 18, 2020 02:01
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I like the Manage This podcast - it's well produced, often informative, and since they are a registered provider it's very easy to claim the PDUs projectmanagement.com has a lot of good webinars - you log in using your PMI credentials and they are automatically reported to PMI within a week of watching. Tons of good ones for paid PMI members, but this cheap bastard has been able to find some interesting free ones.
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Jan 18, 2020 03:07
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Everyone be sure to ask work if they'll pay your PMI membership. Mine did no question at all.
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Jan 18, 2020 03:12
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My work just instituted a policy of paying for up to $3k a year in graduate school credits, plus unlimited spend on test prep and test fees for professional certifications. They also are hosting a 5 PDU class on PM fundamentals that I'm signed up for. Looks like I'm getting a free PMP. 
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Jan 20, 2020 03:49
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Dik Hz posted:My work just instituted a policy of paying for up to $3k a year in graduate school credits, plus unlimited spend on test prep and test fees for professional certifications. They also are hosting a 5 PDU class on PM fundamentals that I'm signed up for. Looks like I'm getting a free PMP. Nice! If this was the corporate thread I'd make a joke about a 4 year requirement for 100% reimbursement.   
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Jan 22, 2020 01:58
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CarForumPoster posted:Nice! If this was the corporate thread I'd make a joke about a 4 year requirement for 100% reimbursement. 1 year to qualify and a 12 month prorated clawback period afterwards. Not bad, imho.
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Jan 22, 2020 02:53
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Dik Hz posted:1 year to qualify and a 12 month prorated clawback period afterwards. Not bad, imho. Yea thats better than a Fortune 100 company I worked at. One was "ALL classes within 24 months paid back, 2 yr qual" and the other was 1yr/qual, 1yr payback, similar to yours. I wonder if theres any way to do a very long stint at HBS or Sloan...$3k a year doesnt buy much MBA wise.
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Jan 24, 2020 04:15
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CarForumPoster posted:Yea thats better than a Fortune 100 company I worked at. One was "ALL classes within 24 months paid back, 2 yr qual" and the other was 1yr/qual, 1yr payback, similar to yours.
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Jan 24, 2020 04:34
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Heners_UK posted:Everyone be sure to ask work if they'll pay your PMI membership. Mine did no question at all. Same. I’m deciding if I want to do the new one in March or not. It’s cheaper (work pays, don’t care) but more importantly if you fail you get a second kick for free ... and the structure looks more interesting.
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Jan 28, 2020 16:22
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This is a little outside the regular PM scope but I have a project portfolio management problem that I was hoping someone might have a good idea for. Some background I am the operations manager of a 90-100 staff professional services company. We have grown rapidly over the least three years (from 15 to 100) and as a result a lot of new systems, process and projects are underway or have been partially implemented to make us more efficient in how we operate (haha…). We don’t have a PMO as our consulting work isn’t really “project based” in that way. It’s very much “specialist meets clients, agrees needs, talks to them heaps over 3month to 5 years, we get paid, done”. We have excellent resource management processes for all this and it’s no issue. Where more than one consultant supports a client they us their own project management processes and a range of tools/software to manage that. We don’t mess with that. It’s working fine. We do however have a ton of internal ‘projects’ underway to change the way we do things and we have a mountain of new business processes that have either been designed on the fly or only run for one FY cycle so need a ton of ironing out. Because most of our staff are consultants out in the field, they have no time to support these projects. So almost all of it is done by a small number of managers and internal business support roles (think 6-10 people). We need a way to better plan, prioritise and track:
what I’m wanting to find Ideally, I’d like a fairly simple tool where I can enter what is happening (projects/processes), who is in charge (by person or team/business group), what the key milestones are and what strategic goals it relates to. I’d then like to be able to map the key milestones across the year so I can adjust deadlines/milestones, understand issues around conflicting work/workload and actually cull some of the stuff we really don’t need be doing. The biggest issue really is understanding what key activities/milestones currently happen when (i.e. which month) and whether this makes sense in the grand-scheme of things. I do not need a project management tool. I don’t need resource management on a person by person basis. I don’t need any financial, budget etc info. But it’s not as simple as just having a board of “in progress” and “backlog” because we don’t run on an agile basis and operational business activity doesn’t happen in sprints. Tons of the big PPM tools available have what I need but they are WAY WAY too big given they do a million other things as well. Plus that comes with a jolly big price-tag and we are looking for something which the CEO, CFO and I can use not something we want to roll out to the whole business. Project management tools on the other hand require way too much detail to give me a wrap up/high level view when I don’t care about HOW this works gets done. I only care about IF and When (usually what month not what day) it gets done. Any ideas/suggestions would be much appreciated. PS: here’s a picture of what this planning process looks like on paper on a whiteboard. I.e. one post-it per milestone with project name on top and in swim lanes by lead team/group. This was taken when we got about 10% of the way through and got sick of writing the same post-it’s out over and over but it does work well for visualising everything that is on the go. I would be very happy with this in digital format with the ability hide/show post-it’s based on project/team/individual/strategic link etc for future tracking purposes. 
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Feb 6, 2020 21:16
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Dori posted:This is a little outside the regular PM scope but I have a project portfolio management problem that I was hoping someone might have a good idea for. Maybe I'm missing something, but what about a Gantt chart? https://trello.com/power-ups/5b30f2417825075d3e126cbb/bigpicture https://instagantt.com/
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Feb 6, 2020 22:01
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Something like jira/trello would work pretty well. Even something as simple as ms project to line up linked activities grouped by a rough wbs would help a ton.
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Feb 7, 2020 00:12
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Dori posted:This is a little outside the regular PM scope but I have a project portfolio management problem that I was hoping someone might have a good idea for. I know you’re saying basically NOT JIRA but JIRA cloud with the big gantt plug-in seems like it’s what you want and doesn’t not cost much. This combo will let you do more waterfall style PM in JIRA which it sounds like achieves your goals.
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Feb 7, 2020 09:43
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This is a bit of a rant, but I want to compare experiences for a second. I just joined my agency’s PMO in May and I really enjoy the work for the most part. I can see myself making Project Management my career, but not here. Brief backstory: I rose through the ranks starting as a temp in the call center through network technician and landed as a Management Analyst in the PMO, which is under IT. I am now in charge of our project to replace 700 workstations with Windows 10 machines. That’s fine, and as I’m learning about the PMI best practices I try to stay on top of the planning, documentation, and communication for the project. However, due to some deadweight in the Helpdesk/technician side of the department, and the lack of Helpdesk supervisor to manage it, I’ve also been doing a lot of technical work related to the project. Like personally testing software on the computers, running training/initialization sessions for all the staff, delivering and installing hardware, and troubleshooting problems as they arise. It’s a lot, and it eats into a lot of what I think I should be doing. As such I’ve been working (paid) overtime for the first time since I started with this company, and I feel a lot of personal pressure when unforeseen problems come up because maybe I didn’t do enough. Learning more about the job academically, think I should be able to delegate these tasks, but there’s no one to delegate to. I don’t actually mind the technical work because I’m a) used to it after a few years doing it as a job and b) I’m a decent teacher for the sessions, but I have a lot of other things I have to do. This isn’t even my only project! Is this sort of situation common? Not specifically with tech, but any field? If there’s a project and part of the work involves, say, calling customers, is the PM likely to be tasked with that? Or is it usually just assigning work out and receiving reports?
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Feb 10, 2020 02:52
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LawfulWaffle posted:This is a bit of a rant, but I want to compare experiences for a second. I just joined my agency’s PMO in May and I really enjoy the work for the most part. I can see myself making Project Management my career, but not here. Brief backstory: I rose through the ranks starting as a temp in the call center through network technician and landed as a Management Analyst in the PMO, which is under IT. It’s extremely common to be an individual contributor in addition to PM. I worked project management for our IT org for awhile that had the expectation that the PM role should be no more than 20% of an FTE (40 hour week) so one had to either manage five or more projects simultaneously or contribute to them in other ways. Your ability to delegate and get to a “higher level” of project managing will depend heavily on your organization, resource availability and project size. Like I said, I used to be right in your shoes but after changing jobs from managing a handful of $50k-$300k projects for a couple years and then moving to manage an $8M/year program, the difference in delegation of responsibilities is night and day.
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Feb 10, 2020 08:14
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Higgy posted:It’s extremely common to be an individual contributor in addition to PM. Yep. Cant speak for IT but in defense someone will usually get more and more PM related activities and small projects delegated to them by a true PM before becoming one themself. During that time they will still be doing technical work. Similar is true for becoming a manager. Most US defense orgs have a matrix style structure so people will do their technical work while having 10-20 matrixed direct reports before becoming a full time manager.
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Feb 10, 2020 15:51
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the most common form of pm is "accidental project manager" and you have a day job on top of that
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Feb 10, 2020 17:53
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Mad Wack posted:the most common form of pm is "accidental project manager" and you have a day job on top of that He was actually very successful at getting his projects completed, which is something I'm still trying to understand.
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Feb 11, 2020 01:12
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LawfulWaffle posted:This is a bit of a rant, but I want to compare experiences for a second. I just joined my agency’s PMO in May and I really enjoy the work for the most part. I can see myself making Project Management my career, but not here. Brief backstory: I rose through the ranks starting as a temp in the call center through network technician and landed as a Management Analyst in the PMO, which is under IT. Too common. Right now I am some weird combo of PM and some BA stuff (specs, etc), with some dashes of department manager, release manager, light product management, and whatever the hell else someone is doing very poorly at the moment. It is going about as well as you'd think. Our owner doesn't believe in titles, and thinks any kind of people management is not a full time job. We do not have functional department managers, and my boss is a director with about 30-40 direct reports who he can't manage Most of the other places I am interviewing for give me similar understaffed vibes, but they're larger and pay a lot more.
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Feb 11, 2020 01:35
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I'm taking a PMP prep course right now (paid for by a training grant to my company). Our instructor is great, but boy is the coursework's ethics unit out in lala-land. There is considerable conflict between the right answers on the practice tests I've taken and the way the real world works. Question: You don't have the authority to keep functional managers from taking all your resources. What do you do? Answers: A) Tell your sponsor you lack the resources to complete the project. (wrong) B) Go to the authority well with your authority bucket and just get more authority. (correct) Dik Hz fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Mar 26, 2020 |
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Mar 26, 2020 19:15
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Dik Hz posted:I'm taking a PMP prep course right now (paid for by a training grant to my company). Our instructor is great, but boy is the coursework's ethics unit out in lala-land. There is considerable conflict between the right answers on the practice tests I've taken and the way the real world works. 
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Mar 26, 2020 21:59
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Dik Hz posted:I'm taking a PMP prep course right now (paid for by a training grant to my company). Our instructor is great, but boy is the coursework's ethics unit out in lala-land. There is considerable conflict between the right answers on the practice tests I've taken and the way the real world works. Welcome to PMI’s world. You just live in it for now.
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Mar 28, 2020 02:41
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Just passed my PMP exam on the 20th and it was hard but not as hard as I thought it would be. A lot of the answers that seemed correct to me were basically “be proactive and communicate” and being aware as to which phase of the project according to The PMBOK I was in. Glad it’s out of the way... maybe I can get a real job now when I retire from the military in a few months if society still exists.
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Mar 28, 2020 07:53
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Any recommendations for small scale project management tracker spreadsheet templates? Probably going to try a random one-page project manager. I don't have access to Jira/etc. Ragaman posted:Just passed my PMP exam on the 20th and it was hard but not as hard as I thought it would be. A lot of the answers that seemed correct to me were basically “be proactive and communicate” and being aware as to which phase of the project according to The PMBOK I was in. Congratulations my friend!
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Apr 12, 2020 20:11
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Passed the PMP this afternoon. My test prep course simultaneously gave me the tools necessary to pass the exam and completely failed to prepare me for what the test would actually be like. My advice for test takers would be to scrutinize every question for which phase you're in, identify which process is appropriate, assume you have more power than God, assume you have no decision-making authority whatsoever, and pick the most proactive answer that aligns with the process you've identified.
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Jun 28, 2020 22:26
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