I have recently completed a book review for Arras People. The book is "Project Management CIRCA 2025", edited by David Cleland and Bopaya Bidanda and my review is published in their newsletter.

(Editor's note: This is a Guest Post by Jason Westland from MPMM.com)

Being assigned to manage a project can be tough and often times daunting. There are the possibilities that no matter how well laid out your plan is and even with an extraordinary and talented team, there will be risks and challenges along the road that can be the cause of the project’s downfall.

(Editor's note: This guest post is provided by Jovaco Solutions)

Project management is no easy task, and can often be a thankless one as well. With projects that include over-demanding clients, creeping requirements, and uncompromising bosses, it is no wonder project management can be a stressful endeavor. Here are seven habits project managers should adopt to avoid falling prey to blown budgets and failed deadlines:

1. Be proactive.

I have added a Costs and Revenues tracking template to the template section. It's an excel document that features Costs and Revenues tracking with baseline, forecast and actual data. The template produces graphs and calculate profit-loss and margin based on a Monthly Reporting period.

You can download the template from the Free PM Templates section.

The telecommunications world is a successful example of technology standardisation. In the mobile industry GSM gave the ecosystem (operators and suppliers) a set of standards that removed a lot of technology risks, enabled the birth of a large set of suppliers and product offering and gave customers roaming benefits and interoperability.

In the crowded space of open source collaboration solutions, or web based project management software there is a new (ish) comer. It's Collabtive.

The product is still "beta" judging by it's current version number (0.6.2) and the project has been running for about 3 years now. Collabtive position themselves as a Basecamp alternative, you can import your basecamp set-up and it offers similar functionality.

Gantt charts are good communication tools towards the project team and toward management and stakeholders. So much that senior management sometimes wrongly associate project planning and gantt chart. What I often do to communicate the project timeline and sequence to senior management and/or customers is a "one page" powerpoint showing a summarised gantt chart.

Triple…Multiple constraints

The triple constraints of Scope, Budget and Time is widely used in project management practices, trainings and publications. The “iron triangle” showing the 3 constraints together (with sometimes Quality or Customer satisfaction in the middle) – with the explanation that if one of the constraint is moving then the other are very likely to be impacted – became a reference in the profession.

Project manager job advertised will ask for PMs able to manage those constraints. Candidate are usually used to this as well.

But things are changing.

I have been working this year for a startup to help a former boss with project planning, with time I took a more active role and ended-up producing the project management plan to roll-out this company’s system.

I am writing this post to explain the overall PM approach we designed for this company and to get your feedbacks and recommendations. I always like a bit of a debate!

Right now we have not started the execution of the plan, so our approach has not yet been validated by experience.

I had a couple of “Twitter” discussions recently about agile vs. ‘traditional’ approach to project management. Traditional means Waterfall for most people (including me), at least in IT.