This paper suggests a standard set of phases that are involved in the provision of outsourced IT solutions and this from the Selling organisation’s perspective. Those phases are presented in relation to each other and form a Phase Review Discipline (PRD).

The phases identified belongs to 3 distinct groups, Win Business, Delivery and Support and we will discuss all three groups here but in particular the Delivery group.

This paper aims at: – stressing the strong relation between sales processes and project delivery processes, and what it means for the supplier’s organisation. – suggest a standard approach for the entire lifecycle, from sales to support, and how it benefits the organisation, – suggest what role a PMO may have in an organisation adopting such a PRD approach.

I have been looking for a WBS tool for a while. I mean an open source/free tool to create by WBS. Of course there is Visio which is installed on my laptop but this is not the best possible tool as I feel it does not allow easy changes to the structure.

I quickly turned my attention to mind mapping software as they indeed based on a hierarchical data model. The visual part of mind maps are however your typical WBS representation.

All too often organisations selling IT solutions ignore the role of project management up until the deal is done and the project is starting. In fact, up until it is too late. Organisation are focused on selling products and licences and ignoring - because it is complex and outside the confort zone of sales department - the integration complexity that would need the inputs of a project manager. Project management is expensive and the pre-sales budget is often not big enough to support this cost.

I have been recently re-reading the excellent book from Stephen Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective Peopleand, stumbling upon the definition of a habit, I made the link to human resources and to a wider extend organisation in the context of project management.

As part of my current assignment I have to manage a number of tests activities involving several testers in several locations, testing several physical environments. To add to the complexity each environment goes through 3 distincts tests phases and we are delivering several sub-systems – each of them with specific tests and testers assigned.

Due to the complexity it rapidly turned out that a simple excel spreadsheet to manage the list of issues arising during testing was not going to be enough. The major issue was to manage concurrent updates to a single spreadsheet.

I successfully took my PMP exam last year. During my preparation time for the exam I had loads of questions about it, I was wondering if I had done enough to prepare for it and in my immediate network no-one had a PMP certification so I could not find someone that could sympathise with me and share with me some tips.

I recently managed a project for a new client of mine where a significant cultural issue came into the picture. Let me share it with you. The project involves integrating a number of my client's products (lets call this company "A") to one of their customers (lets call it "B") in France. My client is based in another European country and the resource center, providing much of the deployment resources is based in yet another European country. In total I have about five different nationalities working on my project and located in 4 different countries.