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.

I am a Drupal fan. Drupal is an open source CMS system. I have been using it for years, probably since version 3 and now using version 6, including for this site.

PMPs (should) know about Earned Value Management (EV, EVM), it is THE Tools and Techniques for Cost Controls in the PMBOK.

For project managers not interested in being PMPs, Earned Value will come as yet another technique for project progress tracking and forecasting.

The objective of this post is to assess what are the things that earned value does not do or does not do well.

What is Earned Value?

Our next PM London Monthly drinks will take place on Thursday the 25th of June from 7pm there:
Silver Cross pub
33 Whitehall
London, SW1A 2BX

Please visit the related Linkedin group for more details: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1886694

This event is obviously free, though drinks are not. If you want to network with London based project managers in an informal way then this is your chance!

Hello -

My wife and I have completed a project together: fully refurbishing our Paris apartment, we are not putting it for short term rent. It is in Paris, in the 14th district, it's a one bedroom flat, can sleep 4 (with the sofa bed) and is fully furnished (including super mega fast fiber optic internet!).

More here: http://3rdfloor.dreamhosters.com