Best Practices in Project Management

• Team Operating Agreement -- Rules of Engagement and Best Practices for a Virtual Team
  • Shared Vision — definition of success for the project or initiative
  • Alignment of intent and vision among the stakeholders
  • Strategies to achieve the shared vision
  • Guiding principles and success factors for effective teams
  • Consideration of methodologies, best practices and tools
  • Cultural norms — existing and new
    • Clarification of roles and boundaries – responsibilities, authority & accountability structure 
    • Mutual support for win-win operations
    • Consensus decisions where the team is responsible
    • Resolving conflict – process and principles
    • Responsive communications
    • Persistent communications
    • Secure and private communications
    • Accountable communications
    • Dealing with "the elephant in the living room" -- a problem for the team that nobody wants to acknowledge because it feels unsafe or uncomfortable to address it
  • Supporting processes
  • Tools that support the cultural norms & processes
  • Team effectiveness metrics -- Success metrics for the partnering relationships 
  • Promises the partners make to each other
  • Measurement of time and value investments 
  • Management of progress and accounting 
  • Concerns, worries and fears
  • Terms and conditions for evaluating and re-negotiating the partnering agreement 
  • Consequences of broken promises and/or unexpected events
  • Conclude a team operating agreement
• Building High Performance Teams Using Team Software Process (TSP) and Personal Software Process (PSP)
• Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model for Software
• SEI's Open System Approach 
• Project Management Institute (PMBOK)
• PMI's compendium of PM templates
• The Business Case for Software Practices -- Keynote Address by Steve McConnell (Construx.com)
• Ten Myths of Rapid Development -- Keynote Address by Steve McConnell (Construx.com)
• "Software Quality at Top Speed" -- article in Software Development, August 1996.  (By Steve McConnell)
• Fujitsu (DMR) Consulting's Macroscope ProductivityCentre (formerly P+) Methodology
• Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) Methodology
• TenStep Methodology -- comparison of TenStep with PMI's PMBOK 
• Balanced Scorecard
• Methodology Checklist and Estimating Worksheet
• Offshore Outsourcing Best Practices
• Developer Best Practices and Guidelines for Applications in a Least Privileged Environment -- Understanding User Account Protection in Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 1
• Getting Started with Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation: A Developer Walkthrough
• Construx's CxOne Software Engineering Framework contains checklists, templates, patterns, and other best practice support for configuration management
• The Standish Group's CHAOS study -- project failure statistics
• The Standish Group's paper on project success
• The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is doing some of the most interesting work in software development today. The SEL was awarded the IEEE's first award for achievement in software processes. This site contains the full text of the Software Measurement Guidebook and other resources.
• NASA Software Engineering Laboratory's Recommended Approach to Software Development contains a Software Development History template on p. 178.
• The SEL's Recommended Approach to Software Development contains a recommended outline of a Requirements and Specifications Document on p. 34, materials needed for a requirements review on p. 38; requirements analysis report on p.55, and a User's Guide outline on p. 154
• Software Engineering Body of Knowledge. The SWEBOK is a project of the IEEE Computer Society to identify, organize, and document all generally accepted knowledge that is associated with the emerging discipline of software engineering.
• Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The SEI is responsible for the capability maturity model (CMM) and other valuable -- and sometimes controversial -- developments. They're doing a lot of exciting work. Many of the SEI documents are available in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) and Postscript formats from this site.
• Software Measurement Bibliography. This is a very extensive bibliography on all aspects of software measurement. The link is to a table of contents that connects to numerous pages where the actual bibliography references are located. This bibliography is maintained by the University of Magdeburg in Denmark.
• Agile Development and Scrum

• Six Sigma

• Quality Plus Technologies Inc. -- Carol Dekkers and her associates specialize in the implementation of software measurement programs based on function points and other metrics. Carol is also the President of the International Function Point Users Group (IFPUG), and a project editor on behalf of the U.S. on ISO Software Engineering Standards (Functional Size Measurement).
• "Software's Ten Essentials" IEEE Software, March/April 1997
• "The Power of Process" IEEE Computer, May 1998
• "An Ounce of Prevention" IEEE Software, May/June 2001
• "Achieving Leaner Software" IEEE Software, November/December 1997
• The Software QA and Testing Resource Center includes FAQ's, software QA and testing resources, software QA and test tools, web site and site management tools, and a "bookstore."
• John Musser's collection of PM resources -- http://www.columbia.edu/~jm2217
• http://allpm.com
• http://tenstep.com
• http://gantthead.com
• FreeMind Mind Mapping utility

PMP Certification

Balanced Scorecard   (local copy)

The Balanced Scorecard, according to Harvard Business School professor Robert Kaplan, translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The Balanced Scorecard prescribes four perspectives:

• financial measures
• customer knowledge
• internal business processes
• learning and growth

These four perspectives offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard, objective measures and softer, more subjective measures.

Tools for Project Management and Knowledge Sharing

Microsoft Project 2002 Solutions Guide

Microsoft's Enterprise Project Management promotion page for partners (may require login by Dan)

About Project Server 2002

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server

• team Web site
• fast, full-text searching through a variety of document data sources
• document version control
• subscriptions to documents and folders (for change notifications)
• document approval routing

Microsoft SharePoint Team Services -- collaboration extensions for Microsoft Office

• discussions embedded within a document
• discussion threads
• team events surveys (feedback)
• subscriptions to documents and folders (for change notifications)

XML List Editor -- manages simultaneous editing of rows in the list by several team members

systemic interconnectivity

Conference calls through The Conference Depot

Initial assessment of project benefits and risks 

List of articles related to project management from TechnologyEvaluation.com

Aligned Decision Processes