10 Best Time Management Apps for 2022

Time management is the potential to leverage the time you've on your hands effectively for executing any activity; this is significant for any business. Technology has undoubtedly enabled us to connect, enhance, perform, and optimize our resources beyond imagination. One of the most outstanding examples of it is time management apps.

What is Time Management App?

These apps are a system that allows both individuals and businesses to monitor time through a detailed view. Leveraging a time management app is one of the most suitable methods to achieve what most of us try for - productivity.

From to-do lists and calendar reminders to meetings, it's easier to get overwhelmed with the number of required tasks. However, due to time management applications, one can track and monitor all the activities and the time needed to finish them.

Leveraging such software helps us to achieve our targets promptly and save time in the long run.

Pros of Time Management Softwares

Time tracking is highly significant. However, it's pretty unnatural as we don't possess the potential to remember everything we perform with natural accuracy.

This is why individuals and companies are letting go of the fallacies-prone spreadsheets and notepads for sophisticated time-tracking software. Now, before investing in the app, you must consider the advantages of such apps:

• Enhance productivity
• Accurate billing
• Evaluate client value
• Project management
• Communicate progress

10 Best Time Management Softwares

Time tracking software makes it simple and convenient to manage time and activities, thus improving productivity objectives for you or your peers. These apps are crucial as time management is a vital skill to learn.

TSheets

This app by QuickBooks is an all-inclusive mobile timesheets software that tracks time on any device for teams of all sizes. Leveraging the TSheets, workforces can log in and out seamlessly and promptly from a mobile app, time clock kiosk, or a computer.

Benefits of TSheets:

• Interactive, real-time reports
• GPS location tracking available to keep tabs on where your workforces are working
• Connects to the favorite accounting software
• Exhibits overtime alerts to inform about weekly overtime limits
• Develops employee schedules by jobs or shifts

Calendar

With solid analytics resources, this app lets us view how much time one spends in meetings to structure the time for prioritizing crucial activities.

Benefits of Calendar:

• Have a broad user base ranging from massive teams to freelancers Connects all the calendars in one place
• Detailed analytics to understand how one spend their time

TimeCamp

It's a unique project system that develops transparent and challenging management. The software offers features like invoicing, reporting, and budgeting to help teams perform better and deliver outcomes on time and within budget.

Benefits of TimeCamp:

• Evaluates the time spent on project with a wider report range
• Allows you to choose between two timesheet templates, i.e., daily and weekly

Timely

This app is an automatic time management software that tracks project durations and helps one organize their workweek effectively. All you need is to offer the workweek in advance to evaluate the time you need to set aside each day for activity completion.

Timely is available for Windows, Android, Mac, iOS, and as a browser app.

Benefits of Timely:

• Makes time entries for the recorded work
• Record each thing you perform while leveraging its Memory Tracker
• Holds an individual accountable for the quantity of time they set apart from work
• Creates reports for easy communication
• Provides a realistic image of how much time projects take for completion

TimeTree

This app is one of the best time management software, with the potential to efficiently share memos and calendars between users. It's suitable for busy families targeting to maintain their schedules in one place.

More than just a calendar, this software comes with an added functionality of memos, replacing the conventional to-do list so that there's a committed place for managing one's busy life.

Benefits of TimeTree:

• Perfect for split households or merged families
• Free app
• Works on different devices

Harvest

This expensive time tracking software leverages the power to answer significant questions like where's my time going? Harvest has vital time-tracking aspects and is installed with an intelligent interface that is seamless and swift.

Benefits of Harvest:

• Ensures that teams have sufficient time to finish all the planned projects
• Tracks billable time and enables us to create invoices promptly to send to clients
• Easily updates time data on the weekly timesheet

Toggl Track

Toggl Track can be leveraged by freelancers, corporate teams, and small enterprises due to its personalized features. For example, this app has the potential to track time spent on activities and run reports to view where people spend most of their time to aid them in being efficient.

Benefits of Toggl Track:

• The support team responds within hours
• Free account for 5 users
• Tracks time directly in tools being leveraged with its merge with different softwares

Trello

It lets us see what all teammates are doing at a peek, so you never miss a chance amid a crucial project. If you're looking to manage activities and projects efficiently, use Trello. This collaboration tool allows you to see and dedicate activities and projects across teams.

Benefits of Trello:

• Collaborates with other tools like Google Drive and Dropbox
• Has free version that is packed with aspects
• Personalized

TMetric

This app gives reports and time tracking aspects that can be automated with browser extensions. So, for example, you can create invoices and send them to clients. There's also a choice for the workforce to monitor, which is relevant when you work with a remote team.

Benefits of TMetric:

• Has an excellent UI that comes with the Chrome extension
• Software available in web and desktop modes
• Has in-built extension with Jira Software
• Includes an API that can be collaborated with the business management software

Wunderlist

It's an effective and straightforward app to manage online to-do lists. This enables us to tick off all professional and personal activities. We can keep track and complete the respective tasks, share our objectives and dedicate tasks to our teams.

Benefits of Wunderlist:

• Integrates with team members and colleagues
• Shares your lists and work done to integrate on a project
• Sets reminders and due dates
• Includes everything from the Web to Wunderlist
• Adds notes to ensure all your ideas are recorded

How To Become a Product Manager?

Product management is the most in-demand job portfolio in the current business market. Yet, they're the few highest-paid professionals in a company because of the extent of their contribution and responsibilities.

Behind every good product provided by an organization that alters the consumer's lives drastically lies the prescient of a product manager. The project manager's responsibilities include analyzing customer requests, monitoring product design catering to that request, and overseeing its development, delivery, and feedback.

What is Product Management?

It is a structural technique in a company that covers every service/product aspect, from its plan to development and marketing. It forms the center of any successful business.

Without any proficiently operating central product, it's almost impossible for organizations to expand their brands and leverage them to sell other services/products.

Project Manager Vs Product Manager

What the firm provides is its product. The workflows it must engage in to make the product accessible to people and earn profit turn to project. Product managers are the prime figures in the release and plan of a product, getting employees within the firm on board with its aim.

After this phase, the project manager's role is to take the responsibility of turning that creative business into a reality.

In contrast, the product manager monitors the internal changes within the product aim. Project professionals convert the concept explained and envisaged by the product managers into actionable steps and timeline-based activities, leading to what the product professional defines as product success.

Project managers are also responsible for the departmental and logistics merging in the project performance.

Prerequisites of Becoming a Product Manager

A degree within the domain in which you're striving to become a product manager and an MBA should make you professionally equipped to apply for product management positions.

Round off this with online programs focused on aspiring product managers that give you a sneak peek into the routine system and technique that product managers deal with daily. It'll put you ahead of more than 70% of your counterparts.

Product Manager Responsibilities

A product manager strategizes a product's vision, launch, profit, and loss potential. Based on the company they work for, their work scope can differ from brainstorming goals for various features, management of engineers working on the execution of that product, to providing exclusive value depending on customer requisites.

The particular responsibilities of the product manager depend on the organization they work for and the product they're executing.

Their roles include:

• Cross-communication between different stakeholders
• Enabling clarity on the product goal
• Creating structures and techniques for a healthy feedback strategy, and
• Setting accurate markers for a particular product's success at what development phase.

Tools For Product Managers to Learn

A committed online program on product management will take you on a trip through different beneficial tools once you set foot into the domain. User tracking tools like Pendo and Roadmapping software like ProductPlan, customer survey tools like Typeform, and Industry Analyst accounts are significant for every product manager. In addition, fundamental expertise in SQL for data-driven analysis comes in handy.

Product Manager: Job Prospects and Salary

They have excellent career prospects and can work in various organizations and roles. For example, based on your educational background and subject expertise, you can apply for the product manager positions in healthcare, Fintech, food technology, or Edutech.

Even if there's no public vacancy, creative product professionals can be recruited depending on their ability to add value to a company. Product managers can earn up to an average of $125,782 annually.

Product Manager: Pros and Cons

The most significant benefit of being a product manager is the freedom and ideation they can practice with the product. They're the game changer behind the minor and prominent features of the product life-cycle and lead the way towards user benefits.

However, considering the negative side, these professionals often face the rage of all stakeholders in case of product failure and end up being victims of many imperfections in the company's structure and red tap behavior.

Tips to Become a Product Manager

• Consider applying to Jr Product Manager, Associate Product Manager, or Product Owner (PO) positions to gain experience that'll help you land in product manager job.
• Don't misjudge the significance of networking.
• Research intensely about the firms in which you're looking for a product management role. Don't be afraid to drop in cold emails highlighting the product strategy you think will add value to their organization.
• Ensure you seek the product manager role because it genuinely captivates you and not because of the job title.

Fast-tracking vs crashing

Let work pile up when we're busy with multiple projects of varying sizes is easy. It's even easier to forget about obligations and commitments in our personal lives. However, planning for various contingencies and scheduling our time can help us avoid these issues.

Fast-tracking and crashing are techniques of schedule compression through which we can avoid the issues. Before moving forward to fast-tracking and Crashing, let's briefly know about schedule comparison.

Schedule Compression Definition

Schedule compression reduces a project's duration by speeding up the project team and resources. This can be done by increasing the number of working hours or by decreasing the number of holidays and other non-working days.

Schedule compression is an integral part of project management because it allows you to shorten the duration of your projects. Therefore, schedule compression is the answer if you want to deliver your products or services faster. However, there are some downsides to using this technique.

The main benefit of schedule compression is that it allows you to deliver projects faster than they would have been born without reduction.

What is Fast-Tracking?

Fast-tracking is a project management technique used when a project is needed to accelerate the completion of a project. Fast-tracking can be used when problems with the originally scheduled completion date or when it becomes clear that the original date is not achievable.

Fast-tracking can be applied to one project or several phases at once. However, it involves adding resources and reducing the scope to complete the project on time.

It can also be applied at any project's life cycle stage. Still, it is most commonly used during the early stages of development when costs are lower. Risks may be more significant if action is not taken quickly.

What is crashing?

Crashing is a technique used to fast-track a project if you've run out of time with regular fast-tracking. You add more people to the project, but since they're working less per hour than the other team members, their salary will be cheaper than additional people.

Their time will be more affordable than regular employees'. However, Crashing can be expensive because you're paying all these extra people, so you have to find activities that save the most time while costing the least money.

You categorize your actions by the lowest cost per unit time, called crash cost. Then you look at which activities will bring the most value while costing the least money.

The results of a crash analysis are usually presented in a crash graph, where activities with the flattest slope are considered first—these lead to an equal amount of time savings but have a minor increase in cost.

Comparison between Fast Tracking and Crashing

Fast-tracking is a technique used in software development whereby a project is accelerated by adding resources to the project team. The main benefit of fast-tracking is that it reduces the time taken to complete a project and allows for earlier release dates.

On the other hand, Crashing is mainly used in software development, which involves adding more people to a task to complete it quickly. Therefore, Crashing can effectively get things done quickly, but there are also disadvantages associated with this project control method. These include:

• Less experienced team members may be unable to keep up with the pace required by crashing. This may result in poor quality work or, even worse, poor quality code, which can cause problems later on down the line!
• There will not be enough time for testing, meaning that any bugs discovered during testing may have already been missed by the developers who have written them!

Fast-tracking also means more resources will be required to complete the project in time. Therefore, it can be implemented only if there are enough resources available within the organization.

Compared to Crashing, Fast Tracking is less labor intensive as it does not require much overtime work from your team members. In contrast, Crashing involves a lot of overtime work from your team members, which may lead to burnout and high-stress levels among them.

The main difference between fast-tracking and Crashing is that Crashing focuses on shortening cycle times while fast-tracking directions create high-quality products as quickly as possible with limited resources.

When to use fast tracking and crashing in a project

Fast-tracking is useful when working on a project with a deadline, and there is no time to do it all by the book. For example, suppose you need to create a website for your business but don't have the time to design it from scratch. In that case, you can use an existing template and customize it yourself instead of paying someone else to do it for you.

There are a few situations where you can use Crashing:

When you want to get rid of some code that is no longer needed. For example, if you have a method used only in one place but isn't called, it still needs to be there. If you don't want to delete the code but don't want it in your program, you can use a crash to remove it.

Suppose you have a method that crashes and wants to test how your program handles this situation. For example, you could ensure that any exception information is logged correctly or displayed in an error dialog box.

Conclusion

Now you know about the two techniques of schedule comparison and their difference. Also, when to use these two techniques, we're sure you'll soon begin to see results in no time.

Best Practices for Preparing a Lessons Learned Document

What do you do when a project is finally over? You celebrate. But not so fast; you might yet finish with your project if you haven't prepared a lessons learned document.

If you're attending a PMP training program or learning for PMP certification, you will understand why preparing lessons learned document is mandatory.

By gathering and publishing lessons, the team learned while finishing previous projects, your company as a whole benefits. You can help minimize the odds of other groups making the same errors and offer insights into how numerous procedures and workflows can be enhanced.

Here, we'll see some of the top practices in preparing a lessons learned document and how they can help a company enhance its project performance.

Best Practices

• You'll study in the PMP certification program, and you should reuse lessons learned from previous projects to manage your current ones better.
• You can save time by gathering lessons as you go along, and you can finalize them amid project closure when the project is completed. This is one of the top methods to ensure that the lessons are accurately recorded.
• Consider conducting regular brainstorming processes with the team to mine lessons that are insightful to the project. This helps in promoting the success of future projects. It's best not to leave until the project ends when memories become vague. 
• Ensure to include positive and negative experiences in the lessons learned document to add the highest value to the upcoming company projects.
• Ensure to include everyone, even relevant stakeholders, while preparing the document, where you prepare the list during or after the project. This will aid in collecting all the lessons in the documents.
• Consider holding a post-project survey to seek feedback on the project from the team, stakeholders, and customers well-acquainted with the project management. This helps in obtaining the lessons learned fresh in people's minds.
• Store your lessons document in a central repository in your company. This makes it seamless and more accessible for other teams to access whenever needed. Several companies have an e-portal for document sharing, such as OneDrive, SharePoint, or different centralized network locations.
• Lessons learned documents should be archived as historical data and merged into organizational lessons learned.
• The primary goal behind documenting the learned lessons is to offer other project teams data that increases their effectiveness and creates an experience earned after each project completion. Sharing your lessons learned with others helps enhance the overall company performance.

Conclusion

If you are working toward a project management accreditation, or considering to do so, iCert Global has project management programs, including PMP certification course that is created to help you pass the test on your first attempt.

Effort vs. Duration vs. Elapsed Time: Project Management Series

What is Effort?

In project management, the effort is the amount of time it takes to complete a task. The action is usually expressed in hours, days, or weeks.

Effort can be used as a metric to measure progress on a project.

For example, if you have a project with ten tasks, each task is estimated to take 30 days. Therefore, you can use the total effort of all functions to indicate how much progress has been made on your project.

Suppose you were working on two projects simultaneously, having ten tasks each with an estimated 30 days per task. In that case, you'd have combined 20 and 60 days of total effort for both projects. If both projects run at the same speed and finish all tasks within 60 days, then you can use the actual attempt to indicate that both are running at the same rate.

What is Duration?

Duration is the length of time for which a project will be in progress. It can be stated in terms of days, weeks, months, or years. The scope, resource availability, client's requirements, and constraints determine the project's duration.

Duration is one of the essential concepts in Project Management because it determines how long the project will take to complete.

Suppose you cannot decide on the time of your project correctly. In that case, there are chances that you may end up overrunning your schedule or underrunning your plan, thus leading to the failure of the project.

Duration is "the amount of time required to complete an activity or process."

What is Elapsed Time?

A project's elapsed time is the amount of time that has passed since the project began. Elapsed time is recorded in days, weeks, months, and even years.

Project managers use elapsed time to indicate how much time has been spent on a particular task or phase.

For example, if a team member has been working on a task for two weeks, then the elapsed time for that task will be two weeks.

It's important to note that elapsed time does not consider any delays or obstacles that may have occurred during a project's life cycle.

 In other words, if an obstacle has affected your team member's progress at work, their actual work hours may be greater than what you see in the report.

The Effort, Duration, and Elapsed Time in Project Management Series

The effort, duration, and elapsed time constitute a small part of the project-scheduling module. You may not need to know these concepts for your exam, but it's good to understand them anyway.

As a project manager, you'll want to be well-trained in project schedules to efficiently manage deadlines and other time constraints. If you're not skilled at this, your projects could start costing more than they should due to delays and other problems.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed reading this article on our effort vs. duration vs. elapsed time: project management series. We hope that it cleared up any confusion you may have had about the differences between these values, how they can help you in project management, and how they are implemented into software systems that automatically track the progress of projects.

In the Project Management community, there has been a long debate about which metric is best for tracking the progress of a project and for managing people's expectations.

Usually, the conversation centers on Effort vs. Duration vs. Elapsed Time. However, the critical thing to remember when measuring project progress is that it is not necessary to choose just one metric.

Project Charter

One of the most crucial and significant documents for every project is the Project Charter. It's the first project document and lays down the fundamentals for the project.

A Project Charter explains a project at a top-notch level and displays the project's stakeholders and method. Moreover, it introduces the project manager to the project.

When it comes to the project sponsors, they own a project charter. These professionals authorize the Project Charter; however, the project manager can create it.

Project stakeholders should approve every Project Charter; once approved, it can't be modified throughout the project life cycle.

What Does a Project Charter Have?

There's no standard norm for what data a Project Charter must have. A Project Charter's format can differ from company to company.

Here, we have listed data that a Project Charter can have:

• Project Name
• Project Description
• Project Scope
• Project Stakeholders
• Business Case
• Project Objective
• Project Timeline
• Project Deliverable
• Project Constraints
• Project Assumptions

Project Scope

The majority of the project bites the dust as the scope of a certain project is not precisely defined. For any project to be practical, the scope has to be clear to all stakeholders without any guesswork.

What is a project scope?

Project Scope is a project's boundary, where every project team needs to deliver as defined and agreed in the Project Scope. This document is the backbone on which the schedule and budget are created.

According to the PMBOK, Project Scope is all the work needed and only the work necessary for project completion. Therefore, every project manager needs to record the project scope and get approval from all stakeholders.

Project scope can vary over time depending on the client's demand change, business case change, or any other applicable reason. However, any modification in the scope is supported by a Change request.

The requester should raise a change request, and it has to get approval from the Change control board. Any change to the project scope will affect the cost, HR, time, communication, quality, and risk.

Project Scope Impact

The impact of project scope change on quality, communication, time, HR, cost, and risk is daunting and takes much time for any project professional to determine the effect. However, if the scope change impact isn't identified clearly, this will adversely affect the project's success.

Define Project Scope

Defining Project Scope is the initial step wherein the project's scope is defined. The scope can be defined in three ways:

1. Deliverable (Internal & external)
2. Functionality (Functional properties of the project)
3. Technical structure (Diagram determine the entire system at a high-level)

Concluding Thoughts

Defining scope is a crucial problem in many projects. An error in project scope can lead to a project disaster. Unless and until the scope is determined accurately, the project cannot be under control, and the scope will keep increasing.

A Project Charter offers a strong foundation for a project. All the project stakeholders are informed about their duties and the level of effort needed from their side.

A Project Charter is leveraged during the starting and planning stages; hence a good Project Charter can aid the project's success. Therefore, a professional must have a Project Charter before taking over a new project.

If a Project Charter is unavailable, it's better to design a Project Charter and get approval from the stakeholders before one begins the project.

Top Project Manager Qualifications and Career Path in 2022

What do project managers do?

Project managers ensure that projects are completed on time, within budget, and to the customer's satisfaction. They have a broad range of skills and must be able to multitask and work under pressure.

Project managers need to be able to:

• Manage multiple tasks at once
• Priorities tasks based on what is most important or urgent
• Work well under pressure, meeting deadlines with minimal supervision
• Solve problems quickly when things go wrong

Requirements for a project manager

Project management is a career that has been around for decades and is still growing in popularity. It's no surprise, considering how many different industries are affected by projects and their success or failure. In addition, project management is constantly evolving to keep up with technological changes and new ideas about how best to manage projects.

Project managers need to have a wide range of skills, from leadership abilities to understanding business processes and concepts. They must also communicate effectively with all members of an organization involved in the project — from executives down to individual workers who perform the tasks associated with a project.

The following are some qualifications required for a project manager:

• Experience managing projects within an organization
• Knowledge of various tools used for managing projects (such as Microsoft Project)
• Knowledge of standard business processes and their place within an organization
• Ability to work well with others and understand their needs

Responsibilities of a project manager

Project managers are responsible for ensuring a project is completed on time, within budget, and quality. Project managers help their teams to determine how to accomplish their goals. They ensure the work meets the stated objectives, is within the budget, and meets quality standards. They also:

• Set objectives and deadlines
• Manage team members' tasks and workloads
• Oversee procurement processes
• Communicate with stakeholders (customers, vendors, and others) throughout the life of a project

Project manager career path

Project management is a profession that covers the entire life cycle of a project, from its conception to its final delivery. Project managers use various tools and techniques to ensure that projects are completed on time and within budget.

Project managers are responsible for planning, organizing, staffing, and leading all aspects of a project from beginning to end. They are also responsible for monitoring each project's performance against budget and schedule, setting priorities, and resolving issues as they occur.

Project managers can be found in almost every industry sector and every type of organization.

Career Path:

Most project managers start with an entry-level position in their chosen field. As a result, they may have little or no experience with project management concepts when they begin their careers.

Still, they generally learn these skills on the job through training programs offered by their employers or courses offered by colleges or universities.

 As they gain experience working on projects, they may advance into more senior positions such as team leader or technical lead.

Project management qualifications are crucial to success

Project management qualifications are crucial to success. The proper certification can help you land a job, get promoted, or grow your business.

Project management is a complex discipline that requires more than just technical expertise. It is also about managing people, resources, and time effectively. A project manager should possess excellent communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and an understanding of human behavior.

Project managers come from various backgrounds and have varying field experience levels. However, some basic qualifications can help them start their career path.

Here are some of the most critical project management certifications:

• Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM)
• Project Management Profession (PMP)
• Program Management Professional (PgMP)
• PMI Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP)

Takeaway: There are many ways to be a successful project manager and no single right way.

There are many ways to be a successful project manager, and no single right way. However, some basic skills and qualifications are essential for success.

Project management is an integral part of any business or organization. A project can be anything from a new product launch to a construction project. It requires careful planning, scheduling, budgeting, and monitoring to ensure successful completion.

The following list covers the skills needed by project managers in 2022:

• Communication skills
• Creativity and innovation
• Customer service orientation
• Leadership skills
• Budgeting and forecasting skills
• Interpersonal skills (including dealing with conflict)
• Technical knowledge (for example, software)
• Planning ability (specifically in terms of managing time to meet deadlines)

How To Become a Sales Manager?

A sales career can be both exciting and captivating. As a result, it's no secret that several aspire to have a sales manager position. However, what does it take to move from single contributor to sales manager?

Today's article will show how one can become a sales manager.

What is a Sales Manager?

Sales managers are the foundation of any successful sales organization. They're responsible for coaching and training sales teams, setting performance targets, and meeting sales metrics.

To become a proficient sales manager, it's significant to have a strong understanding of the process and robust leadership and coaching skills. Moreover, building relationships with clients and understanding their demands is vital. Last but not least, managing and encouraging a sales team is crucial.

Prerequisites to Become a Sales Manager

A sales manager is crucial in any organization that sells services/products. But what is the prerequisite to becoming a sales manager, and what are the managers' critical skills and abilities?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most sales managers have a Bachelor's degree in marketing, business, or a related domain. However, some may prefer individuals with a Master's degree.

A sales manager must have good communication and interpersonal skills and experience in sales and customer service. They should also be able to lead and encourage sales representatives' teams.

Some of the critical areas that are covered in the sales management course are:

• Sales fundamentals (Prospecting, qualifying, closing, and account management)
• People management (Coaching, training, and leadership)
• Business awareness (Understanding financial statements, market analysis, and business strategy)
• Technology (CRM, data analysis, and social media marketing)

Personality Traits of Sales Manager

Certain traits are common among sales professionals. They're usually highly competitive, persuasive, and outgoing. They also have much energy and are very determined to reach their objectives. To be successful in sales, it's significant to have a positive attitude and take a rejection pace.

• Resilience
• Passion
• Assertive
• Integrity

Duties and Roles of Sales Manager

The routine duties of a sales manager are comprehensive and can change often. However, some significant functions are always vital. For example, sales managers must encourage and inspire their team, set and track objectives, analyze data, and offer support.

Sales managers are responsible for creating and executing a strategy. They must also coach and develop their sales team, manage customer relationships, and determine new sales opportunities. Moreover, they must often track sales performance and analyze data to optimize outcomes.

When it comes to the roles of sales manager, there are three primary types:

• Hunter: This sales manager is responsible for determining and closing new venture opportunities. They're outgoing and aggressive and try on the challenge of identifying new leads and winning new contracts.
• Farmer: They're responsible for developing and maintaining the business relations that have been established. They're more introverted and focus on building strong client relationships.
• Nurturer: This manager takes care of their clients and nurtures the relationship. They offer an emotional outlet for their clients and are excellent at developing trust. Due to this, they're usually successful in roles like inside sales, account managers, and relationship managers.

Sales Manager Salary

Sales manager salary can vary significantly based on the organization, experience, and position. However, some wide ranges can give you an idea of what to expect.

• According to Indeed, the average salary per year for a sales manager in the US is $76K.
• According to Glassdoor, the average annual salary for a sales manager is $77,811. This can vary from $41K at the low end to $130K at the high-end.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median annual wage for managers is $117,960. This too can go from $57K to $208K.

Benefits of Becoming a Sales Manager

The benefits of becoming a sales manager are as follows:

• Sales jobs are often the first to be cut during difficult times; however, sales managers are usually more daunting to replace. Hence sales manager has more significant job security.
• Sales managers have greater control over their work life, allowing them to set their hours to balance work and personal life.
• Sales professionals make more than their sales representatives as they have more knowledge and experience.
• A good sales professional can move up the career ladder more swiftly than a sales representative.

How to Become a Sales Manager

Sales managers are vital for any enterprise. They connect the organization and its clients and are responsible for bringing in new ventures and maintaining customer relationships. However, becoming a successful sales manager isn't a piece of cake. It takes hard work, commitment, and some tips to assist you on your path.

• Understand the services/products that your organization sells
• Develop robust listening skills
• Excel the art of negotiation
• Ensure you give and receive feedback efficiently
• Be passionate about sales.

Enterprise Environmental Factors and Organizational Process Assets

Table of Content

What are the enterprise environmental factors?

What are the organizational process assets?

Organizational culture, policies, and procedures

Organizational infrastructure

Market conditions

Organizational knowledge base

Corporate lessons learned from databases

Conclusion

What are the enterprise environmental factors?

Enterprise environmental factors are the external conditions that affect the organization. These factors include:

Economic Factors: Economic factors include the availability of capital, fluctuations in the business cycle, and changes in government policy.

Technological Factors: Technological factors include technological advances, new products and services, and competitors' use of technology to create new markets.

Social Factors: Social factors include changes in demographics (changes in population age groups), cultural influences on individual behavior, and government regulations on business practices.

Political Factors: Political factors include changes in laws and regulations affecting an organization's operations or profitability.

What are the organizational process assets?

The organizational process assets are the organization's knowledge, information, and experience. They include processes and procedures, policies, work instructions, standards, guidelines, and other similar documents.

The assets exist at all levels within an organization — from strategic planning to day-to-day operations — and comprise a large percentage of the total value of any company.

Organizational process assets provide a competitive advantage to any business because they enable companies to perform their work more efficiently and effectively than their competitors.

Organizational culture, policies, and procedures

The organizational culture, policies, and procedures result from the corporate environment. They exist because the environment needs to be supported by them. The organization aims to create an environment where employees can do their jobs effectively.

For an organization to accomplish its goals, it must support the people who work in it. It does this in many ways:

• By creating a workplace that is safe and secure.
• By providing tools and resources that help employees get their job done.
• By offering training so employees can learn new skills and so on.

Organizational infrastructure

The organizational infrastructure is the foundation of the organization. It includes the human, physical, and technological resources used to support the organization's activities. The corporate infrastructure may be divided into two major components:

Process assets refer to the knowledge and expertise used by an organization in its daily processes. Process assets include training manuals, procedures, or checklists required to perform specific tasks. Process assets may also include computer software programs that allow employees to perform their jobs more effectively or efficiently.

For example, a company might have a process manual that describes how to operate their cash registers properly or a software program that allows workers to enter data into their computer systems faster than they could be using paper records.

Physical assets refer to equipment, buildings, furniture, and other tangible items an organization uses for day-to-day operations.

An example of physical support would be a water tap inside an office building where employees could fill up their water bottles on hot summer days before returning to work.

Organizational knowledge base

The organizational knowledge base is the accumulated body of information that describes the steps and procedures used to perform tasks. This includes experience, corporate knowledge, and best practices.

The organizational knowledge base can be internal (company-owned) or external (public domain).

Knowledge management is an area of research and practice devoted to increasing the value of an organization's intellectual assets.

The field has been studied for more than two decades. Still, it wasn't until the 1990s that organizations realized the value of their intellectual assets (intellectual capital).

Knowledge management can be defined as "the identification, creation, accumulation, and dissemination of knowledge to generate wealth through innovation and action.

Corporate lessons learned from databases

The use of databases has become an essential part of the work environment for many organizations. There are several characteristics of databases that can provide businesses with a competitive advantage. These include:

Reliability: Reliability is the ability of a database to be up-to-date, accurate, and consistent at all times. When a business relies on its database for critical information, it must be able to trust its accuracy at all times.

Accessibility: A database should be accessible by authorized users anywhere at any time. This allows employees to make decisions based on the latest information available in the system.

Efficiency: A good database will make it easier for employees to store, retrieve, and manage information. The more efficient employees use the system, the less time they spend on tasks that don't directly contribute to their jobs, and the higher productivity rates will be for each employee.

Conclusion

As you can see, EEFs and OPAFs are only two of many different aspects that need to be considered to create a practical process map. Creating a meaningful process map is not as simple as simply drawing some boxes, connecting them with arrows, and deeming your work done. To be truly effective, a process map must be developed considering the various factors affecting the success of the processes being mapped—internal and external.

Five Levels of Organizational Conflict| PMI-ACP Agile Certification Training

One of the primary criteria for an Agile project manager is the potential to identify and resolve conflicts at the earliest. In Agile, conflict is referred to in two diversions:

1. Conflicts indicate that the Agile team has the freedom to voice their opinions and differences, and problems within the group.
2. If the conflict isn't settled immediately by the teammates, it can cause issues impacting the broader interests of the project.

Depending on the intensity, conflicts are differentiated into five levels and named the five levels of Agile conflict. The higher the level, the more challenging it becomes for leaders to resolve the problem with a polite settlement.

The Five Levels of Agile Conflicts

Agile Conflict Level 1

Here, the Agile team determines the issue rising in the project. Then, the team discusses and shares the issue among members and the project leader. This conflict level is a constructive issue-solving stage common to all high-level projects.

Agile Conflict Level 2

Here, the conflict becomes a disagreement matter among the team members. The members start to distance themselves from each other, and due to several issues, they stop taking the initiative to resolve the conflict. Though this level doesn't witness an open war; however, all the members wait for others to enter and resolve the conflict.

Agile Conflict Level 3

At this level, multiple issues were left unresolved, creating complex scenarios within the team. Different groups in the same team are made, and every member stands supporting one or the other group. In such a case, the conflict becomes like a competition, and more than problem-solving, the focus is more thrown light on winning than compromising.

Agile Conflict Level 4

Here, the contest becomes a battle, where groups start to imagine that the other group will never change and must be desolated. As a result, positions get replaced, and the only focus is safeguarding one's belonging group.

Agile Conflict Level 5

Here, the conflict becomes a war where no solution seems to arise. It heads to destruction by mutual consent. Level 5 of Agile conflict is the highest difficulty conflict level.

Agile Conflict Resolution

An Agile project leader should understand the conflict level and take relevant actions depending on the difficulty. Here are some methods of conflict resolution that an Agile project professional requires to follow against the different conflict levels:

1. At Agile conflict level 1, one must focus on consensus and collaboration. The crew is in a constructive discussion, and all they require is motivation and a push to make them strive towards achieving a resolution. The project leader should ensure that each member is heard and respected throughout the discussion.
2. The team should be reunited at Agile conflict level 2 for a discussion. Here, there's a willingness to discuss and settle the issue; therefore, the unit must be supported to come ahead as they'll not do so on their own.
3. In Agile conflict level 3, one must involve the team in some compromise and initiate discussions. One must ensure that personal enmities take a step back and everyone negotiates for an open discussion.
4. At Agile conflict level 4, shuttle diplomacy is a must. Here the conflict level is higher, so bringing both groups as one for a discussion is impossible. One must take both teams separately and strive to settle the differences before letting them for a table discussion.
5. At Agile conflict level 5, the collateral damage is fixed. The only thing one can do at this level is to strive and limit the damage.

These are the five conflict levels in Agile and the methods following which project leaders can solve the conflict. To know more about Agile leadership and practices, join iCert Global's PMI-ACP training program.

Top 10 Project Manager Interview Questions and Answers for 2022

Hr managers and Sr. executives recognize project management as requisite to enterprise success. They know that certified project professionals are among their most valuable assets.

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI) survey in the US, over $122Mn gets wasted for every $1Bn invested due to poor project performance. When it comes to recruiting certified project professionals, things get a little challenging, and candidates are reviewed in several ways.

Getting through an interview proficiently is both a science and an art. There're many unknowns; however, focusing on relevant areas and providing the right answers based on the questions in the interview aids you to get selected.

In this top 10 project manager interview questions and answers 2022 article, we will help you prepare for your interview and excel in it.

Q1. According to you, what is Project Management?

Project management helps in performing numerous methods, techniques, knowledge, skills, and experience to attain the goals of a unique project. However, the final deliverables and a definite deadline are critical factors differentiating project management from standard management.

Therefore, a project manager must always follow the project management rule - 6P (Proper Planning Prevents Poor Project Performance).

Q2. How do you define an ideal project?

This is one of the most important interview questions of the project management, to know what type of project you would take up. By answering this question, you open up new opportunities to manage projects that help you ace.

Ensure that your answer includes multiple points, such as whether you're interested in working alone or as a team, the kind of timelines you prefer, and whether you're keen on creative projects.

Q3. What are the knowledge domains? State its relevancy in a project.

Knowledge domains are the central technical subject matter that is essential for the efficient management of a project. Knowledge domains are the main technical subject matter that is essential for the efficient management of a project:

• Project Integration Management
• Project Scope Management
• Project Schedule Management
• Project Cost Management
• Project Quality Management
• Project Resource Management
• Project Communications Management
• Project Risk Management
• Project Procurement Management
• Project Stakeholder Management

Q4. Imagine your project has gone off the rails, so, what will be steps you would consider to get back on the track?

Once you realize that the project is going as per the planned time, scope, goal, or budget, the following top priority is to get on the right track. The project manager should be proficient in taking vital steps to resolve the inconsistency between planned and actual progress.

Your answer to this question may include re-adjusting resource management, determining the exact cause of off-tracking, putting in extra effort, and more.

Q5. Mention the techniques you might leverage to define a project scope?

This question aims to understand your expertise in the concerned area. Here, you can explain various concepts involved in defining a project scope like Product Breakdown, System Analysis, Alternatives Analysis, Requirement Analysis, Value Engineering, System Engineering, and Value Analysis.

Q6. How to prioritize tasks in a project?

Task prioritization is crucial and especially when a project is challenging. It helps to ensure the successful and timely completion of the project. Follow the below-given points to state your task prioritization in the project:

• List responsibilities and tasks
• Differentiate between significant and urgent
• Assess the value of each task
• Order the tasks by measured efforts
• Stay flexible
• Known when to say 'No'

Q7. Explain your strategy to deal with internal conflicts among the team members?

Here, the recruiter is trying to understand your mediation skills and how unbiased you are during conflict resolution. You can state why it is vital to listen to both the parties and understand their viewpoints.

Your answer should also include how you convince either party to reach a conclusion that works best for the project and delivers a win-win scenario. Moreover, it would help if you communicate how, you ensure both parties aren't benefitting from the other's loss.

Q8. Explain the team forming process you follow in managing a project?

A project manager should know about the different phases a team goes through during a project; therefore, this is one of the most common questions seen in exams and project management interviews.

For example, for the formation of a team, there are five development phases - Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning. While answering this question, you should explain each of these stages accurately.

Q9. When would you escalate an issue?

Consider escalating an issue if:

• The issue may cause a budget overrun or project delay.
• You have tried to reach an agreement and establish a common point with everyone worried
• You have previously strived and failed to solve the issue with numerous techniques
• You or other team members are forced to take on a massive amount of addition work because of the issue.

Q10. What's your leadership style?

There are numerous ways to lead, each with its pros and cons. Regarding project management, it's impossible to avoid bringing up a leadership manner. A project manager may have to select how they lead depending on the project, from top-down to servant leadership. Examine their understanding of leadership methods and apply them to project management.

This brings us to the end of today's article. We hope it helped in adding up to your knowledge. If you found these interview question articles helpful and relevant, check out the PMP training course by iCert Global, a PMI-approved training institute with services offered worldwide.

Got a question? Please mention it in the comment box below, and we'll get back to you.

PMP Vs MBA: Which Will You Choose in 2022?

A common interview questions we might have heard is ‘Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?’ Hence, it’s high time we start questioning ourselves where we would like to be 5- or 10-years’ from now.

A professional designation such as MBA or PMP accreditation is supposed to help us in gaining a competitive edge in our career; hence, it should satisfy the below-given criteria:

• Make you more worthy for the job market
• Must have short and long-term benefits
• Should aid you in earning more.

Any kind of designation you consider must be evaluated based on these points. Ultimately, the answer will depend on your personal career preference, though there are a few facts a professional must consider before making a decision.

An Ocean of MBA Graduates

There was a period when an MBA degree was random, a 2-year graduation degree that not many acquired. Moreover, there weren't many colleges that offered the degree course.

But as the demand for MBA courses sky-rocketed, several education providers started offering short executive MBA courses, making it seamless for a working person to get an accreditation and for those who could afford one.

At present, MBA courses are more surplus than ever before. This is because every college/university has leaped into the MBA drive. Adding to this, the online education choice looks like an ocean of MBA graduates and courses.

However, a question that still remains: Is the sector all set for the massive wave of professionals? Apparently not. Professionals realize that their careers are static even after investing thousands of dollars and time to gain an MBA credential.

On the contrary, PMP works according to the industry requirements. Therefore, you get trained in the sector of your choice to fulfill a specific need of the vertical. Indeed, a PMP accreditation helps professionals develop their skills while working in the industry.

Another fact to consider - PMP is relatively a new program, and there aren't many PMP professionals in the job market compared to MBAs.

Standardizing MBA Programs

MBA degrees are created to develop managers. Therefore, an MBA program can be standardized, hardly targeted on a certain vertical or functional field, which is its top-notch strength. Preferably, an MBA degree can find jobs in any industry vertical.

However, companies, especially technology giants, have recognized that they require more than just managers. They need professionals who understand and work with technologies.

So, what’s the solution that enterprises have come upon? Will they hire professionals with a solid technical background and lack leadership and management potential?

The answer to this is the PMP credential, where individuals attain technical knowledge and managerial skills. Professionals with the certification are immediately recognizable to recruiters as someone with actual skills. In addition, the PMP certification training offers specialized expertise that an MBA lacks and has a higher value in the job market.

MBAs Cost a Fortune

How much does an MBA program cost? Probably worth a king's ransom. A good grade MBA course can cost you around $100,000.

However, when we compare MBA and PMP costs of education, PMP certification turns out to be relatively budget-oriented, i.e., an average expense of PMP is $2,000.

Another factor to consider is that MBA takes more educational hours than a PMP certification. Moreover, the average salary of an MBA in the US is $105,684, while that of a PMP is around $112,000.

Once the professionals are done with their PMP training, the certification holders get more handsome remuneration than an MBA holder at 1/50th the price.

The State of the Economy

The last decade has been a white knuckle, and the organizations have been pressurized to evolve for survival. As a result, many have become leaner, meaner firms, while those who failed to make changes have fallen out.

That being the case, recruiters are looking for professionals suitable for their company's portfolio, individuals with hard-earned competency who can exhibit leadership in their selected areas. Hence, it's not surprising why organizations recruit PMP-certified project managers these days.

What is Your Choice: MBA, PMP, or Both?

Now that you've got an idea of why PMP is more advantageous than an MBA in an organization, the ultimate choice to decide is yours.

But there are few benefits to an MBA that a PMP certification can't match. For example, MBA programs teach business theories and practices that aren't covered in a PMP certification training. Moreover, if you acquire an MBA degree from a reputed college/university, you get access to good networking opportunities.

In contrast, obtaining a PMP credential prepares the candidate for what is known as the rapidly growing profession in the modern world. It needs a professional to have sound work experience, which the accreditation then builds upon. As a result, the certification makes you job-ready.

In the Erewhon world, you should aim for both the credentials, and this is the choice several individuals are making - MBAs are acquiring PMP accreditation and vice versa. Having both is sure to make you an all-rounder in any verticals.

About US

If you're looking for PMP certification training, explore iCert Global's training courses to aid you prepare for the PMP credential test. Our courses are conducted by certified lecturers and they are designed to help you pass the exam on the first attempt.

Gain an in-depth understanding of project management and learn how to manage challenging ones with our Project Management Training course now.

Stakeholders in Project Management and their Role You Should Know

Table of Content

Identify the project stakeholders

The Role of Stakeholders in Project Management

Importance of Stakeholder Management

Project management with global teams

How to communicate with project stakeholders

Conclusion

Identify the project stakeholders

Project stakeholders are those affected by or interested in a project. In other words, they are the ones who will be affected by your project's success or failure.

Stakeholders can be internal or external to your company and can include:

Project sponsors and stakeholders: These members of your management team support the project and are accountable for its success or failure. They are vested in seeing that the project meets its goals and objectives, as well as its budget and schedule.

Project clients are people who hire you to do a job for them, such as designing a new product or building a new facility. They pay for your services and expect you to deliver what they have requested within their time and budget constraints. (Note: You may also be considered a client if you hire someone else to complete work on your behalf.)

Project team members: These include everyone who is directly involved with carrying out the work of the project, including anyone with special skills needed to complete tasks such as programming or graphic design work.

The Role of Stakeholders in Project Management

Stakeholders are the people and organizations with a vested interest in the success of your project. They can be internal to your organization, such as other departments or teams, or external, such as customers who will be using the product or service you're developing.

Stakeholders play a vital role in project management because they are the individuals who will either benefit from or be impacted by the result of your project—because of this, engaging them early on in the process is essential, and keeping them informed throughout your project.

The stakeholders will also play an essential role in helping you define what success looks like for your project. This will help set clear goals and expectations for everyone involved with the project!

Importance of Stakeholder Management

The importance of stakeholders in project management is that they are the ones who can define the success or failure of a project. In addition, the stakeholders are the ones who will be affected by the project and its outcome. For this reason, it is essential to ensure that all stakeholders' needs and requirements are considered before starting any project.

Project management with global teams

Suppose you're working with a team located in different places. In that case, thinking about the best ways to communicate with that team is essential. You should consider this at the beginning of your project and share the details in advance in their language. In this way, you can manage a global team without any problems. By doing so, you will save time and energy on your project.

How to communicate with project stakeholders

A project manager should know the mode of communication and time of transmission of all the stakeholders on a project. A well-discussed format for reporting can reduce the problems caused by miscommunication. So a project manager should know how the stakeholders like to communicate so that he can choose the correct formats for reports that are easy to understand and distribute.

Conclusion

Stakeholders play a vital role in project management. However, as we have seen, stakeholders will have different functions. Some may only be interested in the outcome.

In contrast, others may be more active in seeing their vision become a reality. Either way, when you are chosen for a particular project, it is essential to get as much information as possible about all aspects of the project and treat each one with respect and attention. This will help improve your overall performance, inevitably leading to being picked for more significant projects or even promoted within your workplace.

What role you should play and who are the stakeholders with high importance in Project Management is something that you should be aware of and not just think for a one-time involvement in the project.

 You must understand your role, the importance, and how to relate and communicate with all of the key stakeholders in Project Management to complete the project successfully.

Top 10 Project Selection Methods for Project Managers

When you have various challenging and captivating projects to select from, identifying a project that suits your team's potential, competency level, and has the best success rate is the initial step in effective project management.

Project selection methods provide a set of time-tested practices related to deep logical reasoning to select a project and strain undesirable projects with a low likelihood of success.

These methods are significant for practicing project professionals and enthusiasts preparing for the PMP credential test. Therefore, this blog will see the top 10 project selection methods in detail.

What are the Project Selection Methods?

Imagine that a company you're working for has been given numerous project contracts. However, due to resource restrictions, the company cannot tackle all the projects at a time; hence they decide on the projects that maximize profitability.

This is where the project selection technique comes into action. There're two categories for this method:

• Constrained Optimization Methods
• Benefit Measurement Methods

Though time-consuming, employing these techniques is crucial for an effective business plan. There are different documented techniques for project selection; however, the basic thumb rule - for small projects (not complex), the benefits measurement model is beneficial; whereas for large ones, the constrained optimization method is better.

10 Best Project Selection Methods

1. Benefit Measurement Methods

This technique is based on the present value of estimated cash inflow and outflow. Cost benefits are calculated and compared to other projects to make a decision. The methods leveraged in Benefit Measurement are:

• Payback Period
• Scoring Model
• Opportunity Cost
• Economic Model
• Internal Rate of Return
• Discounted Cash Flow
• Benefit/Cost Ratio
• Net Present Value

2. Payback Period

The Payback Period is a primary project selection method, where the ratio of the total cash to the average per Period cash is calculated. Then, it's time significant to recover the expense invested in the project. 

How is the Payback period calculated?

Payback Period = Cost of the project / Avg annual cash inflows

When the Payback Period is leveraged as the project selection method, the project with the shortest Period is preferred as the company rapidly regains the original investment. 

However, there are a few restrictions to this approach:

• Doesn't consider the time value of money.
• Benefits accrued after the Period are not considered. It focuses more on liquidity while profitability is neglected.
• Risks involved in individual projects are ignored.

3. Scoring Model

This is an objective technique where the project selection committee lists relevant requirements, weighs them according to their relevance and priorities, then adds the weighted values. Once the scoring of the projects is completed, the project with the top score is selected.

4. Opportunity Cost

It is the cost that is given up when choosing another project. Therefore, the project with a lower opportunity cost is selected during the selection process.

5. Economic Model

Also known as Economic Value Added (EVA) is the performance metric that estimates the worth-creation of a company while defining the capital return. It's also described as the net profit after deducting taxes and capital expenditure.

If several projects are assigned to a project professional, the project with the highest EVA is chosen. It is expressed in numerical terms and not as a percentage.

6. Internal Rate of Return (IRR)

It's the interest rate at which the Net Present Value (NPV) is zero, i.e., when the present outflow value equals the current inflow value. The IRR is the annualized effective compounded return rate or the discount rate, where the NPV of all cash flows from a specific investment equals zero.

It is leveraged to choose the project with the best profitability; when selecting a project, the one with a higher IRR is selected.

When leveraging the IRR as the project selection requirement, companies should remember not to use this solely to judge a project's worth. For example, a project with a lower IRR might have a higher NPV, and, assuming there's no capital restriction, the project with the higher NPV should be chosen as this maximizes the shareholder's profit.

7. Discounted Cash Flow

It's a known fact that the future value of money won't be the same as today. For instance, $20K won't have the same worth a decade from now. Hence, during cost investment and ROI estimations, ensure that you consider the discounted cash flow concept.

8. Benefit/Cost Ratio

The benefit/cost ratio is the ratio between the present value of inflow or the cost invested in a project to the current value of outflow, which is the return value from the project. Projects with a higher benefit-cost ratio or lower cost-benefit ratio are generally selected over others.

9. Net Present Value (NPV)

NPV is the difference between the project's current cash inflow and cash outflow values. It must always be positive. When selecting a project, one with a higher NPV is preferred. The merit of considering the NPV over the Payback Period is that it considers the price's future value. 

However, there're restrictions on the NPV:

• There isn't any generally accepted method of deriving the discount value used for the present value estimation.
• The NPV doesn't offer any picture of the profit or loss that the company can make by embarking on a particular project.

10. Constrained Optimization Methods

It's also known as the Mathematical Model of Project Selection, leveraged for massive projects requiring comprehensive and complex mathematical calculations. The methods leveraged in constrained optimization methods are:

• Linear programming
• Multiple objective programming
• Non-linear programming
• Dynamic programming
• Inter programming

However, these topics aren't discussed in detail in the PMP accreditation. Therefore, for the credential test, all that is necessary to know is the list of mathematical model techniques that are leveraged in project selection.

Risk Register in Project Management

Table of Content

What does Risk Register in Project Management mean?

Why is it important?

When to use it?

How to use it?

What are the benefits of using a risk register in project management?

How do you create a risk register?

What does Risk Register in Project Management mean?

The risk register is a list of all the identified risks in a project, also called threats and opportunities. In addition, it contains risk analysis information such as probability, impact on the project, and recommended action.

The risk register helps the project manager to plan how to manage the identified risks on their projects.

It also helps identify high-risk areas that need special attention from the project manager.

Why is it important?

A risk register is a document that helps to manage project risks. It is a list of identified risks and their potential impact on project success. It also includes the risk mitigation strategy and the priority of managing them effectively.

The risk register is beneficial for project managers and project team members because it helps them identify the potential risks early in the project life cycle. This makes it possible for them to take proper measures before the problem arises.

The risk register provides an opportunity for learning from experience to avoid similar mistakes in future projects.

In addition, as a result of analyzing the risk register, decision-makers can make informed decisions about whether or not to accept a specific project or continue with it further based on their knowledge of its benefits and costs.

When to use it?

• Identify potential problems and areas where risk may occur (e.g., when deciding on the scope of a project)
• In Planning how you will manage risks in your project
• In the Monitoring phase, you can use it to:
• Monitoring for changes in risk (e.g., new threats, changes to existing risks)
• Review what happened with each risk during execution (e.g., did management action or contingency plans work?)

What are the benefits of using a risk register in project management?

• It provides an overview of all the risks in your project. You can easily see how many risks there are and the priorities for each.
• It helps you plan for worst-case scenarios. You can see what would happen if each risk occurred, and you can take steps to avoid these outcomes or minimize their impact if they do occur.
• It helps you prioritize your work effectively. You'll know which risks need immediate attention and which can wait until later in the project.
• It helps communicate between teams, stakeholders, and external parties such as customers or suppliers.

How do you create a risk register?

A risk register is a list of all of the risks for a project. It is usually created as part of the project planning process and can be modified throughout the project. A risk register's objective is to ensure that risks are identified and managed proactively rather than reactively.

A risk register should include:

• Risk identification. What are the risks? What are you going to do about them?
• The likelihood of each risk happening (using one of four scales: high, medium, low, very low). How much impact would it have if it did happen?
• The consequence if the risk did happen (using one of three scales: major, minor or negligible). How likely is it that this will happen?

Conclusion

Utilizing a risk register and documenting your risks can create action plans in case things go wrong. A risk plan allows you to anticipate problems before they happen and adjust the project accordingly, potentially saving time, money, resources, and even expensive mistakes.

A risk register is a list of all of the factors and events affecting a project. Keep in mind that risk registers are very flexible. The one you create may not look like other risk registers you've seen before, but be sure to include everything that might affect your project. If you don't, you'll want to do so later and work twice as hard. So determine what's necessary before each stage of your project!

The Difference Between General Operations Management and Project Management

When preparing for the PMP credential exam, there are various subjects to learn about. This blog will show the difference between general operations management and project management.

Before the comparison, let us first see what both terms mean.

What is General Operations Management?

A general operations manager has a broader responsibility than the project manager, and their role is permanent, while that of a project professional is temporary.

Operations management is a continuous function in a company that executes tasks that generate services/products. Some examples of ongoing operations include HR and accounting.

A company requires those roles no matter what objectives they are working on. There are three kinds of systems in production and operation management in both service and manufacturing sectors:

1. Non-repetitive Systems

Systems related to low demands differ from the other two; the systems put more stress on planning, monitoring, and controlling the tasks of services/products. The criteria of these systems result in the development of project management.

Product, process, or project-oriented management is hard to define. To leverage a simplified example, planning and designing a new car model is a project, whereas running a factory that creates the cars is a mass-production system. When it's time to transform the car model, it's time for a more flexible and adjustable process-oriented approach.

2. Mass Production System

Sectors with top-notch services/products and high investment leverage the product-based mass production system, which focuses on the practical procedures that help generate the product or execute the service.

Particular purpose devices, like automated conveyors, are leveraged to execute the activities required for the service/product, making it efficient in generating massive quantities.

3. Batch Production System

When various services/products are needed in the same industry, the batch production system acts as a good substitute, especially when the demand isn't high, the investment is low, and flexibility is utmost.

The system is adjusted when production transforms from one product to the next. Here the complexity of management increases over the batch production system, which is process-oriented, whereas a mass production system is product-oriented.

What is Project Management?

As said, the role of a project professional is short-term, i.e., a project team is a temporary association. However, in a fixed general operations management team, the members report directly to the manager who leads the team; those member roles are generally long-term.

The manager is responsible for developing good team working and setting the rules and behaviors of the group. In addition, they need to build trust and respect within the team, motivate sharing of information, opinions, and feelings for the team's benefit, and set goals to appraise the member's performance.

While a project team will be made of people from various company departments, the project professional's job is similar; sometimes, project teammates may report to the department manager and the existing manager. As the priority of other managers changes, the team's stability can vary.

It can be challenging to maintain teamwork as the members may change periodically to adjust the departments' priorities. In a changing team, the members who don't know each other may find it daunting to share opinions, feeling, and information openly. In addition, as the member often reports to more than one manager, evaluation of their work may pose an issue.

General Operations Management Vs Project Management

Performance Reporting in the Project Management

What is Performance Reporting?

Performance reporting is collecting and analyzing project performance data and then communicating it to project stakeholders.

Performance reporting can be an essential part of project management because it helps keep everyone involved in the project informed about how things are going.

Most project managers use software tools to track performance data, such as earned value management (EVM) or a project management information system (PMIS).

But even if you don't have access to any particular software tools, you can still create simple reports that will help you communicate with your team members and stakeholders.

How Is Performance Reporting Done?

Performance reporting typically involves creating tables or charts showing where time and money have been spent on a project.

These tables or charts are often referred to as burn-down charts or burn-up charts because they indicate how much has been burned through (burned down) of the total budget or how much has been burned up (used) by a specific point in time, respectively.

The idea behind these charts is that they allow you to see how much time and money is left before reaching certain milestones in your project plan.

Why Do You Need Performance Reporting?

Performance reporting is a way to keep your projects on track. It can help you identify issues early, making them more accessible and less expensive to fix later.

For example, suppose you see that your team members are struggling with a particular task. In that case, you can schedule time for them to receive additional training before moving on to the next project phase.

If you notice that one part of the project lags behind another, either by days or weeks, you know where you need to focus your efforts first.

You may also want to check whether any bottlenecks in the process need immediate attention from senior leadership or other departments within your organization.

Performance metrics can be used for internal reporting purposes and communicating with stakeholders outside your team — such as senior management or clients — about how well things are going.

What Are the Deliverables of Performance Reporting?

The deliverables from performance reporting will depend on what type of information you're looking for. For example, if you're evaluating a completed project, your deliverables could include:

• A summary of the project's goals.
• A list of all activities performed during the project.
• A summary statement that summarizes all the information above.
• Analysis shows how well each activity performed against its original expectations.

When Should You Perform Performance Reporting? Periodic Milestones

The best time to perform performance reporting is at frequent milestones, such as during the weekly status meeting or after each sprint.

These milestones are regular checkpoints where you can review the progress of your project in a high-level way, note any issues that have arisen since the last checkpoint and take action on them if needed.

Example of Performance Report

The following are some examples of performance reports:

Cost Report: The cost report shows how much money has been spent on the project so far and how much money is estimated to be paid in the future. This gives you an idea of whether or not you will have enough money left in your budget by the time the project is completed.

Resource Report: The resource report shows how many resources are used for each activity in your project plan. This helps you determine if certain activities require more resources than others, which may indicate that those activities need to be reorganized or rescheduled.

Schedule Status Report: The schedule status report shows how close your project's activities are to being completed at any given time. This information can help you determine any delays in your project schedule and what actions should be taken next to address those delays (such as moving activities up or down in priority).

Conclusion

iCert Global offers a variety of Project Management courses to help you pass your PMP exam. Our PMP training courses are designed by seasoned industry professionals with years of real-world experience in multiple Project Management training paths.

Classes are taught by certified, highly experienced professionals ready to help aspiring project managers get the education they need—not only for the PMP® certification exam but also for valuable real-world knowledge for any project management career.

Guide to Project Cycle Management: Everything You Need to Know

Project Cycle Management (PCM) is a technique based on years of development, focused on planning and organizing projects via basic principles and defined stages. This method encloses project inception to its planning and execution.

What are the benefits of the PCM method?

• Strategic risks
• Better efficiency leading to cost and time savings
• Effective rate of timely project execution and delivery
• Precise and quantifiable objectives
• Better likelihood of meeting expectations
• Efficient resource management

In this blog, we will discuss about PCM and why it adds value to the projects.

Working of Project Cycle Management

PCM enforces a project's lifecycle by focusing on an efficient system with proven outcomes. It's organized in phases aligned for precision, objective targets and expectations, and universal practice.

Each stage works similar to a book's chapters, to begin and complete before moving on to the next step. This ensures better quality results and fulfillment of agreed project expectations.

When a level is complete, the new one begins. As a project professional leads a team through each stage, they can shift their initial point ahead until the total project completion.

PCM leverages fundamental project management principles - prioritizing project structure, a defined stage, accurate targets, transparency, identifying risks, and other elements.

A significant positive result from leveraging this technique is budget-oriented and organized with quality outcomes on time.

Why Project Cycle Management?

Various experts have experienced the mind-blogging feeling that comes with a massive project. It sometimes seems paradoxical, especially if similar projects have faced significant challenges. Several factors can twist things when dealing with a team, a stringent deadline, several partners, and myriad financial risks.

PCM is a proven technique that helps eradicate that risk and build a more effective practice. In addition, this method allows experts to manage projects throughout the complete project lifecycle confidently.

There are three significant reasons why we leverage the PCM technique, and they're:

1. Transparency

When managing a project, it can be daunting to communicate along the path. The PCM leverages accurate techniques to define each stage and where teams are along the procedure.

This provides leaders to communicate with partners, stakeholders, and interested parties related to the project. A practical and transparent communicated project makes everyone delightful, and aids promote expectations and objectives.

2. Simplicity

The PCM technique simplifies the project. Simplicity is essential in a challenging situation with several elements working simultaneously. When leaders can streamline the procedure, this develops better outcomes that lead to optimum success. PCM leverages stages that break up the process.

3. Enhanced Productivity

Effective productivity means everything when it comes to saving time and expenses and enhancing quality. Teams can perform the project successfully when the PCM stages simplify the process.

Once a project upgrades from overwhelming to possible, employee morale and proficiency enhance. In addition, a more productive project develops a healthy and prosperous workspace.

Project Cycle Management Phases

The center of PCM is its five stages, where each phase ensures successful levels that add up to one complete project performance. This technique is an effective and accurate way to meet expectations on time and foresee challenges. The five phases of PCM are:

1. Initiation

Every project begins with a simple idea. The initiation stage promotes that idea and creates a big image, scope, and project goal. Next, project professionals will review the critical project controls required and domains for enhancement before starting a project and assess what it will take for project completion.

2. Planning and Design

Similar to any good project, planning is a vital step. It's where outcomes, preparedness for hurdles, and other crucial factors occur. A good plan makes a drastic difference, and PCM focuses on developing a robust blueprint to reduce risks.

3. Execution

The most prolonged phase of a project's lifecycle is execution, where all the hard work gets done. This is the literal plan execution, where a team works on a project to deliver quality products. The previous stage clearly defines each level of the way.

4. Monitoring and Controlling

Sometimes there are worst and best-case situations, and a good plan ensures professionals can expect both. The monitoring and controlling stage is the trial-and-error process that tracks progress to ensure issues are promptly solved and the deadlines are still aligned to fulfill their target.

This stage is about balance, as too much control can consume time, and insufficient control can exceed risks.

5. Closure

If a project isn't closed professionally, it can continue to drain resources and create unexpected issues. In this phase, a project professional will lead the formal steps with their client to end and deliver the final project. The closure is thus a significant step to gaining feedback and assessing the outcome.

Concluding Thoughts

PCM has proven to be an effective and developing technique to generate successful outcomes for projects worldwide and in several sectors. When project manager decides to learn about the process in-depth, they provide themselves with a successful result and a better leadership role.

Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM): Templates, Types, and Tools for 2022

If you are searching for "Requirements Traceability Matrix" templates, this is the right place. This post will detail all kinds of templates, types, and tools that will help you use RTM to trace your requirements.

What is the Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM)?

Requirements traceability is the process that tracks requirements as they move into design and development and where they go when they are checked in to the appropriate locations.

Having an RTM also allows you to monitor the amount of work taken up by the various groups and how much work remains. This helps you evaluate how efficiently your team is functioning.

The following requirements traceability matrix templates, types, and tools allow a more efficient and effective workflow for your company's requirements management.

Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) Essentials

Requirements traceability matrix (RTM) is a diagrammatic representation of functional requirements, showing how they relate to one another.

It helps trace each requirement back to its originator(s). In addition, it serves as a guide for identifying missing information or defects at any stage of the development process.

The matrixes can be used at different levels – from project level down to component level and even individual requirement level – depending on the number of stakeholders involved and their role in the project life cycle.

Why Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) Needed?

The main objective of RTM is to provide traceability between different elements of a project like projects, requirements, defects, test cases, etc. The below-mentioned points show why RTM is needed:

• It helps link all related documents together in one place to make it easy for anyone to access the required information at any time.
• It makes it easier for testers to understand how they can use this information while testing and what they should not do while trying.
• It helps testers identify gaps between documents such as requirements and test cases which may result in missing functionality during the testing phase.

Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) Types

Following are the types of RTM:

Forward traceability: Forwards traceability is proper when there are many revisions and a large backlog. It traces the product requirements from the definition phase to the testing phase.

Backward traceability: Backwards traceability works in the opposite direction as compared to Forwarding traceability. Backward traceability traces the validation of the product from testing to the requirement definition phase.

Bidirectional traceability: Bidirectional traceability supports both backward and forward tracing. It is often used in large projects with multiple development cycles. Bidirectional RTM covers all aspects of the development cycle, from the requirements gathering process to the testing cycle.

Benefits of RTM

The benefits of using a traceability matrix are numerous. It can help:

• Improve the quality of products and services.
• Reduce the time required to find information and resolve issues.
• Identify relationships between different parts of a product or service.
• Make it easier to identify problems and solve them more quickly.

Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) Tools

A Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) tool is software that automates the creation and maintenance of RTMs. It typically allows users to perform search queries on their RTMs, allowing them to see which documents contain which requirements or vice versa.

Modern Requirements4DevOps: Modern Requirements4DevOps integrates with Microsoft's Azure DevOps, TFS, and VSTS and provides project managers with traceability through every stage of the process

Visure Requirements:  Visure Requirements is a tool that tracks changes made during the development process, providing complete traceability.

ReQtest: ReQtest is cloud-based and customizable; it provides traceability from project start to finish.

Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) Template

Conclusion

This article has tried to cover all aspects of RTM tool development. However, there are times when you would need to have an urgent requirement change, or if you have to make a hotfix, you can make it with the help of RTM.

Nonetheless, RTM helps in preventing any dissociation between requirement and code. An RTM is a one-stop solution for the testers and the developers. Further, it determines the bugs that programmers need to fix as soon as possible to eliminate them.

Of course, you can also use the requirements traceability matrix as a standalone solution to identify a mapping between test cases and requirements.

Analytical Questions from Procurement Management Knowledge Area

In this blog, we will discuss few analytical questions from the Procurement Management knowledge domain in PMP exam, to make you understand the logic behind easy calculation.

Q1. A cost-plus-incentive-fee (CPIF) contract has an estimated cost of $150,000 with a predetermined fee of $15,000 and a share ratio of 80/20. The actual cost of the project is $130,000. How much profit does the seller make?

1. $31,000
2. $19,000
3. $15,000
4. none of the above

Ans:  Estimated Cost = $150,000

Predetermined fee = $15,000

Share Ratio = 80/20; where 80 is for the Buyer and 20 for Seller

Actual Cost = $130,000

Saving = Estimated Cost - Actual cost = $20,000 ($150,000 - $130,000)

Seller profit = Predetermined fee + (Share ratio of seller * Savings) = $15,000 + (20% * $20,000) = $19,000

Q2. A fixed-price-plus-incentive-fee (FPI) contract has a target cost of $130,000, a target profit of $15,000, a target price of $145,000, a ceiling price of $160,000, and a share ratio of 80/20. The actual cost of the project was $150,000. How much profit does the seller make?

1. $10,000
2. $15,000
3. $0
4. $5,000

Ans: Target Cost = $130,000

Target Fee = $15,000

Target Price = $145,000

Ceiling Price = $160,000

Share Ratio = 80/20

Actual Cost = $150,000

Here, the actual cost is less than the ceiling price and is more than the target cost.

Final Fee = ((Target cost - Actual Cost) * Seller ratio) + Target fee

      = (($130,000-$150,000) * 20%+$15,000

      = (-$20,000 * 20%) + $15,000

      = -$4,000 + $15,000

      = $11,000

Final Price = Actual cost + Final Fee

        = $150,000 + $11,000

        = $161,000.

But final price is more than the ceiling price which is $160,000.

So, the final price which the seller gets is $160,000.

Therefore, the profit that seller gets is $160,000 - $150,000 = $10,000

Q3. A cost-plus-percentage-cost (CPPC) contract has an estimated cost of $120,000 with an agreed profit of 10% of the costs. The actual cost of the project is $130,000. What is the total reimbursement to the seller?

1. $143,000
2. $142,000
3. $140,000
4. $132,000

Ans: Estimated Cost = $120,000

Actual Cost = $130,000

Agreed Profit = 10%

Reimbursement amount = Actual cost + % profit of actual cost = $130,000 + (10% of $130,000) = $143,000

Q4. A Cost-plus-incentive-fee (CPIF) contract has an estimated cost of $210,000, a fee of $25,000, and a share ratio of 80/20. The actual cost of the project was $200,000. Calculate the final fee and the final price.

Ans: Estimated Cost = $210,000

Predetermined fee = $25,000

Share Ratio = 80/20

Actual Cost = $200,000

Saving = Estimated Cost - Actual cost = $10,000 ($210,000 - $200,000)

Final Fee = (Saving * Seller Ratio) + Predetermined fee

                 = ($10,000 * 20%) + $25,000

                 = $2,000 + $25,000

                 = $27,000

Final Price = Actual cost + Final Fee = $200,000 + $27,000 = $227,000

Q5. A fixed-price-plus-incentive-fee (FPI) contract has a target cost of $150,000, a target profit of $30,000, a target price of $180,000, a ceiling price of $200,000, and a share ratio of 60/40. The actual cost of the project was $210,000. Calculate the final fee and the final price.

Ans: Target Cost = $150,000

Target Fee = $30,000

Target Price = $180,000

Ceiling Price = $200,000

Share Ratio = 60/40; where 60 is for the Buyer and 40 for the seller

Actual Cost = $210,000

Here actual cost is more than the target price and also higher than the ceiling price. So, the seller is in trouble.

Let’s see how much he gets?

Final Fee = ((Target cost - Actual Cost) * Seller ratio) + Target fee

     = (($150,000 - $210,000) * 40% + $30,000

     = (-$60,000 * 40%) + $30,000

     = -$24,000 + $30,000

     = $6,000

Final Price = Actual cost + Final Fee = $210,000 + $6,000 = $216,000.

But final price is more than the ceiling price.

Therefore, the final price is $200,000.

Q6. A fixed-price-plus-incentive-fee (FPI) contract has a target cost of $9,000,000, a target profit of $850,000, a ceiling price of $12,500,000, and a share ratio of 70/30. The actual cost of the project was $8,000,000. Calculate the final fee and the final price.

Ans: Target Cost = $9,000,000

Target Fee = $850,000

Target Price = $9,850,000

Ceiling Price = $12,500,000

Share Ratio = 70/30

Actual Cost = $8,000,000

Here actual cost is less than the target price and also lesser than the ceiling price.

Let us see how much the seller get?

Final Fee = ((Target cost - Actual Cost) * Seller ratio) + Target fee

     = (($9,000,000 - $8,000,000) * 30% + $850,000

     = ($1,000,000 * 30%) + $850,000

     = $300,000 + $850,000

     = $1,150,000

Final Price = Actual cost + Final Fee = $8,000,000 + $1,150,000 = $9,150,000.

PMP Study and the Types of Contracts

If you're a project professional, you're aware of the various types of contracts and the licit features of projects. For instance, if you've to outsource a product/process to third-party subcontractors or vendors in the middle of your project, then what sort of contract will you leverage for the service provider.

Scenarios like this are why project professionals require to have a sound knowledge of various contract types so they can tackle contract negotiations seamlessly.

In this blog, we will see the three fundamental contract types and give instances to aid you in understanding when you would leverage them.

Fixed Price Contracts

Fixed-price contracts are also called Lump Sum contracts. The buyer and seller make a deal on a fixed rate for the project. The seller often agrees on a high-level risk in this contract type. The buyer is on the minor risk list as the seller's accepted price is fixed. 

However, ensure this sort of contract has fully detailed properties, project scope statements, and checklists from the seller, which the buyer will leverage.

With this kind of contract, sellers may strive to cut the scope to deliver the projects within time and budget. If the project is completed on time with the required quality, the project is over for that contract. However, if the project gets delayed and there are expense overruns, the seller will take in all the extra expenses.

Here are a few types of fixed-price contracts:

Fixed Price Award Fee (FPAF): If the performance of the seller surpasses expectations, an extra cost, i.e., 10% of the total rate, has to be paid to the seller.

Fixed Price Economic Price Adjustment (FPEPA): The fixed price can be considered based on the market pricing rate.

Fixed Price Incentive Fee (FPIF): Though the price is fixed, the seller is given a performance-based bonus. The bonus can be dependent on one/more project metrics like time, performance, or cost.

Cost Reimbursable Contracts

What do you do when the work scope is vague? Since you're not sure what the project needs, a fixed-price contract is out of the book. Here is where you will need to leverage a cost-reimbursable contract.

What is a cost-reimbursable contract?

It's also called a cost disbursable contract, leveraged when the project is high-risk, or the scope isn't clear. The buyer pays all costs; hence the buyer endures all the risk. 

Under this type of contract, the seller works for a fixed time and raises the bill, indicating the contract's profit once the work is done. The price may be dependent on chosen project performance or other metrics.

A major downfall of a cost-reimbursable contract is that the seller can increase an unknown or unlimited rate the buyer is forced to pay. This is why this type of contract is rarely leveraged.

Here are a few types of cost-reimbursable contracts:

Cost Plus Fixed Fee (CPFF): The seller is paid a fixed rate that is accepted upon prior work start. The project cost incurred is reimbursed based on this, irrespective of project performance.

Cost Plus Award Fee (CPAF): The seller will receive an incentive including the actual project cost incurred; this contract is similar to a cost-plus incentive fee (CPIF) contract.

Cost-Plus Percentage of Costs (CPPC) or Cost-Plus Fee (CPF): The seller will receive the total amount they incurred amid the project in addition to a percentage of the fee over cost; this is always advantageous for the seller.

Cost Plus Incentive Fee (CPIF): A performance-based incentive fee will be paid to the seller over and above the expense they have incurred on the projects. With this contract type, the incentive is an encouraging aspect for the seller to fulfill or surpass the project's performance metrics.

Time and Material Contracts

It, also known as Unit Price Contracts, is a hybrid of fixed price and cost-reimbursable contracts. For instance, if the seller spends 1200 hours on a project at $100/hour, the seller will be paid $120K by the buyer. This type of contract is typical for freelancers, and the main benefit is that the seller makes money for every hour spent working on the project.

Concluding Thoughts

As a project professional, you must land the correct contracts with various service providers to minimize risk and deliver the project within time. You must always consider the appropriate contract to offer optimum value for money and time spent on the work while safeguarding it from risks.

Project Documentation and Its Importance in 2022

Project documentation is something that we usually ignore. But why? Project documentation plays a vital role in the success and failure of the project completion itself. It acts as a guideline to efficiently manage the project and gives precise estimates of its cost. It is also an asset to the project owners, vendors, and team members.

A web application or an IT project should be adequately documented with well-designed documentation to minimize the risk of failure and improve user knowledge.

In addition, having clear and comprehensive documentation helps in easy and accurate appraisals of the work performed. Unfortunately, however, many IT projects fail because of mismanagement.

One of the key reasons for such failures is improper documentation by the project managers. Therefore, any project manager must understand how vital quality documentation is for successful projects.

Why is Project Documentation necessary?

Project documentation is the backbone of any project. It helps stakeholders understand the purpose and goals of the project, how it will be executed, and what resources are needed.

It is an essential part of every project management process. Creating a document helps you manage your project by providing specific details about what needs to be done and when. The paper also acts as a roadmap to help you track what has been completed and what remains to be done.

Project documentation is often overlooked, but it should not be underestimated because it can help you save time and money.

 In addition, you can avoid mistakes by referring back to your documents if, at any point, you feel like something is not going according to plan or if there is a change in direction due to unforeseen circumstances or changes in requirements.

What are some examples of project documentation?

Project documentation is a set of documents describing a project's process and outcomes. The documentation may be in reports, memos, or other written documents.

Having proper documentation for all your projects is essential because it helps you track and manage your work better. It also allows you to determine what has been achieved and what remains to be done.

The following are some examples of project documentation:

Project Charter: This document describes the scope, purpose, and objectives of the project, along with the deliverables required from your team members. This document will help you to develop an overall vision for your project and set goals for your team members based on their performance.

Project Plan: This document contains all the activities required to complete each milestone successfully within its timeframe. It also includes specific details about how your team members will carry out each exercise and how long it will take them to complete each activity.

Project Proposal: A document gives a clear overview of a project's goals, requirements, and value proposition. It highlights the number of resources that will work on the project, the budget allocation, timelines, and the key deliverables.

Project Evaluation: It is essential to document how a project performed – what went well and what didn't meet your expectations. Your team can use this as a reference for their next project to avoid repeating mistakes and improve on successes.

Project Progress Report: To keep everyone on the same page, you will update the project's progress regularly. This report shows how far you've come since the start of the project. In addition, it identifies any obstacles that may have prevented you from moving forward as quickly as you'd hoped. It will also outline your next steps to keep things moving as smoothly as possible.

Benefits of Project Documentation

Project documentation is the process of recording and storing information about a project. The information gathered can be used for future reference and to communicate with other project stakeholders.

The benefits of project documentation include the following:

• It helps ensure the team can work together effectively and efficiently.
• It records what has been done and what remains to be completed.
• It serves as evidence that critical decisions were made and the reasoning behind those decisions.
• It provides an overview of what was done and what remains to be done at any given time during a project's lifecycle.
• Project documentation is also essential for ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

Documentation helps everyone stay on the same page.

Project documentation is essential as it helps keep everyone on the same page. It's also a way to ensure that everyone involved in a project is privy to any changes that happen during the project. So, what are some of how you can use project documentation?

Project Management Documentation: This type of documentation is used by project managers to track progress and keep track of all related tasks and issues.

The data collected through such documentation is then analyzed to see whether or not they have been completed successfully.

Suppose there are any issues with completing these tasks. In that case, this information can be shared with other team members to take appropriate action.

Communication Documentation: Communication documents are used for sharing information about projects with team members, clients, and stakeholders.

Communication documents should contain all relevant information about a project in an organized manner so that people can understand them easily without much effort.

These communication documents include minutes from meetings and emails exchanged between different parties involved in a project.

Financial Documentation: Financial documents are used for recording financial information related to a particular project, like the budget allocated for it and how much has been spent on various aspects of the project.

Conclusion

Writing good project documentation is a necessity in the field of project management and execution.

As per experts, a standard project documentation template or format includes all crucial details of the project along with its objectives, requirements, deliverables, risks, assumptions, etc.

 It also has a perfect platform for discussing between the client and project manager the changes in conditions, budget, etc.

 Comprehensive documentation helps everyone know the project's objective and how to accomplish it on time. Note all small details while working on the documentation to avoid miscommunication between stakeholders later.

Best Professional Benefits of the CAPM Certification 2022

The Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) is a certification that recognizes professionals new to the project management domain. The Project Management Institute (PMI) certifies that aspirants have in-depth expertise in the techniques and principles defined by the PMBOK Guide and all the globally recognized project management methodologies.

CAPM is specially created for enthusiasts with minimum experience in the project management domain, thus, offering them a fundamental understanding of the topic. One of the benefits of a credential is that it gives the highest value to your resume and skills.

In today’s blog, we will discuss the following topics, exploring the advantages of CAPM accreditation.

What's in CAPM Certification?

With CAPM certification, professionals will learn to organize their work with the norms needed by project management teams. People with this credential get higher credibility among peers, PMP certified-holders, employers, and project managers.

Let's see few basic topics you must learn in CAPM credential.

• Project and organization lifecycle
• Project scope management
• Quality management
• Communications management
• Time and cost management
• Stakeholder management
• Project management processes
• Project risk management

Format of CAPM Certification Exam

The CAPM certification test comprises 150 MCQ-type questions, and you have three hours to complete them. The accreditations provided by PMI, including CAPM, are de facto standards and validate a person's skills in initiating, planning, managing, and running massive projects.

CAPM certification professionals can display competency, education, and learning experience to potential peers. In addition, achieving this credential opens up various opportunities for individuals.

CAPM Certification Eligibility Criteria

Like any other credential, there are eligibility requirements. CAPM aspirants must have:

• Secondary degree (high school diploma, associate's degree, or any global equivalent).
• Project experience: 1500 hours
• Project management training: 23 hours prior to CAPM certification exam.

Top Advantages of CAPM Certification

The CAPM credential is a popular requirement that aids recruiters find the professionals most suited to satisfy specific roles in their companies. The credential validates a person's knowledge and experience, followed by their skills to take on significant responsibilities.

Project professionals are required in almost every sector, such as IT, engineering, construction, and more. Therefore, achieving the CAPM credential opens up various choices, including:

Global Opportunities

Among the advantages of CAPM certification, global recognition is first on the benefits list. You will be able to work worldwide, bringing you the choice to travel across the globe to places with more projects. Even within organizations, management may be more willing to transfer a certified professional to international locations if they feel it's in their best interest.

Handsome Remuneration

Project management is one of the best-paying jobs on many professional surveys. Project managers can earn between $90K-$150K per year. CAPM salary for certified holders averages $92K. The top-paying IT sector often pays salaries above $100K.s

Career Incentives

In several scenarios, the CAPM accreditation is a requirement that will help land your career as you shift into new roles and increased responsibilities in a company. Employers trust this certification, and CAPM professionals have proven they can tackle increased responsibility.

Personal Development

Interviewees are often more confident than the competition in their learning while earning their CAPM credentials, making them knowledgeable of the best project management techniques and tools. It isn't just textbook material but a real-life experience that earns one the CAPM credential.

Job Profiles

CAPM for beginners is an entry-level course created for those with little experience in project management. It educates candidates on the basics of project management, including its methodologies, knowledge, and practical techniques.

CAPM professionals can look at job profiles are Sr. IT technical project manager, member relations administrator, PMO operational support analyst, business analyst consultants, and more.

CAPM: A Path to the PMP Certification

Attaining your CAPM certification can be a path to becoming a certified PMP. The PMP certification is a globally renowned and prestigious project management accreditation by PMI. Earning PMP certification can help you:

• Display that you've the experience, education and competency to direct and lead projects
• Improve your career choices by offering you a competitive edge amid job applications
• Increase your earnings potential by earning a handsome remuneration than non-certified peers.
• Enhance your credibility by holding a globally recognized project management certification.

Job Opportunities for CAPM Certification

You'll be qualified to work as a CAPM-certified holder in various project management roles. Some of the most common designations are project analyst, assistant project manager, project scheduler, project manager, and project coordinator.

With a CAPM accreditation, you'll have the significant skills and knowledge to manage projects irrespective of size and complexity efficiently. This credential opens up several doors for your career in this domain.

Besides, from the standard roles you land with a CAPM credential, a CAPM certification professional has a lot more options to select from, some of which are:

• Program Manager
• IT Project Manager
• Construction Project Manager
• Event Planner
• Human Resources Manager
• Recruitment Manager
• Training Manager
• Organizational Development Manager
• Business Process Analyst
• Quality Assurance Manager
• Sales Manager

Project management is a well-established domain. However, the recent developments in job technicalities and the increasing responsibilities make the position more demanding and highly flexible.

It makes CAPM accreditation a benchmark for recruiters seeking to hire suitable professionals. If you're looking for significant career development, CAPM is ideal.

Should You Get PRINCE2® or PMP Certification?

It's easy to be convinced that any PMP certification or PRINCE2® training will make you a better project manager. But unfortunately, you could spend a thousand dollars here or there without knowing what project management certification is proper for you.

At times like these, it's essential to keep things in perspective. Knowing the subtle differences between PMP certification and PRINCE2® training can help you pick the best program for your needs.

If you are a project manager, it would be great to get certified. However, the best choice is to go for PRINCE2® and PMP certifications to become a professional in the field.

What is a PMP certification?

The Project Management Professional (PMP) certification is the world's most widely recognized project management certification.

The PMP exam tests your ability to apply knowledge from the three bodies of knowledge defined by PMI: People, Processes, and Business Environment.

It also tests your ability to apply this knowledge in practice through two scenarios: one in which you're working with a team member and one where you're leading a project yourself.

What is a PRINCE2 certification?

The PRINCE2® certification is a globally recognized project management qualification PRINCE2 stands for PRojects IN Controlled Environments. It was developed to help organizations manage projects more effectively.

The PRINCE2® certification has been designed to reflect the latest project management standards, so it's an excellent choice if you want to gain an internationally recognized qualification that will help you progress in your career as a project manager or practitioner.

The certification helps candidates understand how to plan practical projects, ensure they're successful, and manage change effectively throughout all stages of the project lifecycle.

It also teaches candidates how to work effectively with stakeholders from different departments within their organization and with external suppliers and contractors on large multi-discipline projects.

What's the Key Difference?

PRINCE2 and PMP are two of the world's most widely-recognized and respected project management certifications. PRINCE2 and PMP provide you with a strong foundation in project management.

Completing one or both of these certifications will make you a better candidate by making it easy for hiring managers to see that you can be trusted with their projects. Certifications differ based on a variety of factors such as :

Framework

The Project Management Professional (PMP) certification uses a descriptive framework, giving you the freedom to interpret the material as you see fit.

The PRINCE2 certification focuses on best project management practices, which give you specific instructions on how to do things.

Level of certification

The Project Management Institute offers the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification as a stand-alone certification. However, suppose you are new to project management. In that case, you may want to earn the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) from the PMI first. This credential is just as valuable as the PMP credential but will not require as much time or effort for you to earn.

The PRINCE2 certification is available on two levels: PRINCE2 Foundation and PRINCE2 Practitioner. The Foundation level is geared toward people who will act as informed members of a project management team that uses PRINCE2 methodologies in a project environment supporting PRINCE2; the Practitioner level teaches PRINCE2 methods so that you can apply them while running and managing projects in a PRINCE2 environment.

Methodology

The Project Management Professional (PMP) certification focuses on project management techniques and skills to manage and deliver projects successfully.

The PRINCE2 training focuses on the frameworks and processes necessary for successful projects.

Exams

The Project Management Professional (PMP) exam has 180 multiple-choice questions split into the following areas: people, process, and business environment.

In addition, the PMP exam evaluates your experience with various skills, such as change management, materials management, and quality management. You have 230 mins to complete the exam.

The PRINCE2 exam consists of 75 multiple-choice questions you'll need to answer within 60 minutes. Five of these are trial questions; if answered incorrectly, they will not count against your final score.

The PRINCE2 Practitioner exam is an objective, scenario-based paper that tests candidates on nine questions using a time limit of 2.5 hours.

Pre-requisites of Exam

• A four-year degree.
• 4,500 hours leading and directing projects.
• 35 hours of project management education.

OR

• Secondary degree (high school diploma, associate's degree, or the global equivalent).
• 7,500 hours leading and directing projects.
• 35 hours of project management education.

There are no set requirements for taking the PRINCE2® exams. However, it's recommended that you have some project management experience and formal education in project management before you sit for the exam.

In addition, the Practitioner exam requires you to have passed the Foundation exam.

Conclusion

Ultimately, there's no way to tell you which certification is best for you because it depends on your goals. Are you looking to impact other people's lives, or are you after a project manager job? That will be the dominant factor in your decision.

We can tell you that both certifications will require much work, effort, and time. And in the end, one might make you happier than the other. So pick your goal wisely and go for it!

Creating and Maintaining a WBS Dictionary

In the project scope management knowledge domain, the scope baseline is said to be a union of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), the WBS Dictionary, and the project scope management.

Besides the project scope statement and the WBS, there are a few questions on the WBS Dictionary in the PMP credential test. Sound knowledge of the Dictionary not only aids you in the accreditation exam but helps you manage projects with ease.

In today’s blog, we will discuss the following topics to have an in-depth understanding of the WBS Dictionary.

What is a WBS Dictionary?

It is a document that offers detailed data on each WBS element, including work packages and control accounts. In addition, for each WBS element, the WBS Dictionary may include an epigrammatic definition of work scope, defined deliverables, a list of achievements, and associated tasks.

WBS Dictionary includes responsible organization, start and finish dates, cost estimation, charge number, quality criteria, needed resources, contract information, and technical references to ease the work procedure. The WBS Dictionary is also a vital part of the scope baseline.

The Need of a WBS Dictionary

WBS being a graphic, there is a practical limitation on how much detailed data to be included in each element. However, we can solve this issue by leveraging a short title and a numbering system on the graphic and offering more details about these elements in the WBS Dictionary.

When stakeholders read these detailed interpretations in the WBS Dictionary, they get a much better understanding of the work scope due to their context within the WBS element hierarchy.

The resources will have a sound understanding of their work if they refer to the Dictionary. Lastly, linking document examples and templates from actual projects will significantly enhance compliance with company standards and improve quality.

A WBS Dictionary's advantage is ensuring we do the work right the first time by offering the team the information they require to provide quality deliverables, meeting the project criteria and company standards.

Principles in Creating and Maintaining a WBS Dictionary

Experts strongly suggest that we adopt a typical structure for giving descriptive data for each WBS element in the WBS Dictionary to ensure consistency. It will also act as a template for the reader and the author.

The details should be minimum for WBS elements higher in the hierarchy and maximum for lower-level elements.

Including the WBS and its Dictionary in the same document is an excellent technique. This way, the project team and shareholders won't be compelled to search for any information. If they're looking at the WBS, all the information that the WBS contains will be available to them in the Dictionary, inside the same document.

Because of the changing situations, the WBD Dictionary is under continuous revision. Hence, we should often review the contents of the WBS Dictionary to ensure proper project management.

Tools Needed to Create a WBS Dictionary

Most companies leverage Microsoft Word to create and maintain a WBS Dictionary, but you can also leverage its Project. It's one of the top effective methods as it offers context-relevant information, ensuring synchronization with the project WBS.

Let's see a sample WBS Dictionary:

As you can see, a WBS Dictionary offers detailed information on each WBS element. It provides the team with the data required to generate quality deliverables that fulfill project criteria and company standards.

What is an Issue Log in Project Management?

An issue log is a tool that keeps track of issues, defects, and bugs found during testing. It can be used to track the status of each case, who is working on it, and when the issue was closed.

It can be helpful for both project managers and testers. Project managers can use it to track testing progress and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Testers can use it to see what they're working on at any given time and how many issues they've resolved so far.

Issue logs can be simple Word documents with one line per issue or spreadsheet documents with multiple columns for each piece of information (such as "status," "priority," "date reported," etc.).

Why Have an Issue Log?

The main reason why you would want to keep an issue log is so that you don't forget about any problems that came up during your project. If you don't write down every situation, then it's possible that some issues could slip through the cracks and never be addressed.

This is especially true if multiple people on your team are responsible for different aspects of the project.

The following are some of the most common uses for issue logs:

1. Identify trends and patterns in project management problems so you can address them more effectively in future projects.
2. Help teams improve their performance by showing them what areas need improvement.
3. Document problem resolution efforts, so stakeholders know when they were addressed and how they were resolved.

What Does an Issue Log Look Like?

An issue log is a list of all the issues that have been identified in a project. In addition, it is a record of things that need to be done, such as tasks, risks, problems, and changes in scope.

Project managers and other team members use the issue log as a reference point for the current status and what needs to be done next. It helps them see which problems are resolved and which still need attention.

A good issue log should include the following information:

Issue number: This can be any identifying number or name relevant to the issue, such as "Product defect #1". This will help you keep track of the order in which problems are resolved or closed out.

Type: The type of issue (task, risk, problem, etc.) will tell you how it should be handled. For example, suppose a case is flagged as a task. In that case, it means it's not yet complete but should be within the next week or two at most; whereas if it's flagged as an improvement suggestion, this means you'll need to take action on it at some point but don't necessarily have to do it now.

Rightsizing Issues

Project management is a complex task that requires a lot of time and effort. Because of this, project managers often have to deal with issues that are left unresolved or are not given enough attention.

An issue log is a tool project managers use to record issues' status and resolution. This log can be used by anyone in the organization who needs to know about a topic or wants to ensure a problem has been addressed.

To use an issue log effectively, these steps you need to follow:

1. create a template for your issue log so everyone knows what information needs to be included. You should also consider making templates for each type of issue so users will know which template they should use when reporting a problem.
2. Identify your team members responsible for creating new entries in the log, updating them, or closing them out (if they're resolved). Make sure they understand what needs to be included in each entry and how difficult it is for them to do their job if they don't have access to accurate information about open issues!

Goals of Managing Issues

An issue log is a list of issues that have been identified in the project. Common mistake project managers make is trying to solve every problem as soon as it's found. This can be very inefficient and often leads to wasted time and effort.

The goal of issue management is to resolve all identified issues efficiently so that they don't affect the schedule or budget of your project.

Some crucial goals for managing issues include:

1. Prioritizing issues based on their severity and impact - The severity refers to how much harm a subject can do to your project.

For example, suppose you have not yet selected a vendor for a critical product component, and two vendors could provide what you need. In that case, one may be more expensive or less dependable than the other. The impact refers to how much delay or overrun will occur if this issue remains unresolved.

2. Ensure all identified issues are fixed before moving on - If an issue is left unresolved, it may cause problems later in the project when something else also needs attention (e.g., testing). Therefore, fixing any known problem is essential before moving on with other tasks.

An issue log Tracks Problems in Projects

An issue log can be helpful for tracking problems in projects. It's an excellent way to keep track of what needs to be done and when and how it's being done.

Issues are usually tracked in an issue log or bug database. For example, if you're developing software, you might have a case log that contains bugs that users have reported. Or, if you're designing a website, you might have an issue log that includes the changes that need to be made to the site.

Because issues can be complex and involve several people working together, it's essential to keep track of when each problem was created, who created it, how long it has been open (i.e., not yet resolved), and what needs to be done about it and so on.

Conclusion

Issue logging is a function of issue tracking. It is also sometimes known as issue management. Still, both terms are synonymous with maintaining a list of issues that need to be resolved by the team. An issue log is essentially a repository of problems that have been identified but not yet put to rest.

 The purpose of issue logging is to bring attention to the problems facing a team or organization in the hopes that they can be resolved and the team can focus on the work at hand. This can sometimes prove difficult because so many items need attention, and it may require much time to resolve some of them.

However, this does not mean you should ignore an item if you think it will affect your work; every piece of information needs to be logged in case it develops into something more than just an annoyance.

Top 25 Productivity Tools to Maximize Your Time in 2022

Everyone is constantly trying to be more productive. We all strive hard to get more done at home and work while working less. However, staying effective can be a massive order in this reign of remote working, with diversions in the digital and personal space.

It can take more than a person's effort to remain effective. That is why it makes sense to take the aid of productivity techniques and tools.

Today's blog will highlight the top 25 productivity tools and how executing them can maximize your time in 2022.

Before jumping into our main topic, let us first see what are productivity tools and how increased productivity enhance our life?

What is a Productivity Tool?

Productivity is an estimation of how efficient you're at what you do. Productivity tools are software created to simplify tasks, streamline work procedures, and often include factors that let us access documents swiftly, design graphs and charts for project plan visualization, progress, and more.

How Increased Productivity Enhance our Life?

It isn't confidential that productivity is a necessity for career success and personal happiness. Productive individuals are prized assets in the professional environment, while productivity brings content and a sense of achievement to a person.

However, productivity is hard to accomplish factor. A primary reason is that our brain is wired to diversion, making our minds travel to dreamland easily, and our focus span is shorter than ever.

25 Best Productivity Tools you can Leverage

1. Infinity

Keep your team in sync and on the same page with Infinity which expands daily productivity. Few key benefits include efficient task management, better team collaboration, and time tracking with Clockify.

2. Shift

Shift is a desktop app that is build to streamline your accounts, workflows, and apps. Switching between multiple accounts has never been an easier task. Two of its best aspects are cross-platform support and unified search across multiple Google accounts.

3. Toggl

It's a time-saver app that easy to leverage and can merge various tools to increase functionality. Two of its top aspects are offline time tracking and the instant overview of team growth and time.

4. Microsoft OneNote

Microsoft OneNote is a digital note-taking application that is build to operate on any platform/device such as smartphones or laptops. This app can be used to write, type, and draw with a pen-to-paper sense. Handy for taking notes, it features audio/video recording and real-time collaboration.

5. Skype

One of the most famous apps for communication over video calls is Skype, that has merged tons of new aspects to aid you stay connected.

6. ProofHub

ProofHub is a comprehensive project and task management tool that helps maintain things organized, improves accountability, and facilitates efficient communication.

By leveraging the tool, you can assign activities to certain individual, organize work procedures by uploading file/documents, and check the time spent at each project stage.

7. Everhour

Everhour is an intuitive time-tracking app that enables teams to reach their targets swiftly. It aids in sticking to project estimates, ensuring that you're with your task all the time.

8. Box Notes

It's an online note-taking software which allows real-time collaboration so you can share views with colleagues or share notes with others without having to worry on security. The living edit aspect allows real-time collaboration.

9. nTask

It's complicated to remain productive while working on massive projects where you've to keep dot on every detail. With productivity tools such as nTask, you can stay on the top of every project feature without losing time and hampering productivity. This tool is great for team collaboration, creating to-do lists, and merging time-tracking tools with workforce worksheets, among other things.

10. Slack

It's a popular team collaboration app to join all team communications. Besides its much-appreciated chat and team communication aspects, Slack lets us track documents, share files and update, and set reminders for meetings and tasks. This app fits in which app such as Dropbox and Google Drive.

11. GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting is an online video conferencing app that allows meetings to be turned into conference calls, share screens, and schedule meetings.

12. Time Doctor

If you want to know where your team is spending their time, even when remotely working, then Time Doctor app is for you. This productivity and time-tracking tool is created specifically for remote teams.

13. Simplenote

This app simplifies note-taking, assisting you to maintain your notes specific, accessible, and accurate. There is no need to waste time while identifying files, just type your search item, and your list instantly updates, and the notes are backed up. You only require to leverage the version slider to switch between versions.

14. GanttPro

GanttPro is an online app that ensure you maintain a track of activity of all teammates. Its key aspects include deadline management, export and sharing files via public URLs, task management, and more.

15. Chanty

Chanty is an easy and fast team chat app that can help improve communication between teams. Its crucial aspects include the potential to make video/audio calls, voice messages within the app, and integrated task management.

16. Hubstaff

Hubstaff is a time-tracking software that can run on your mobile as an app or on your desktop. Once the time is tracked, people get options for paying workforces, invoicing clients, checking in-depth reporting, and more.

17. Calendar

The AI-enabled calendar focuses on your schedule and performs booking, event and meeting organization based on your calendar. The app merges with various digital calendars such as Outlook and Google Calendar. You can even share your calendar with others in your team.

18. Bit.ai

Bit.ai is a document management and collaboration tool that is top choice for collaborating with teams, sharing, tracking, and managing documents at a single place.

19. Harvest

Harvest is a time-tracking software that lets people to track their time on any given activity from the web, phone or any other application.

20. HubSpot's Marketing Hub

One of the top team collaboration tools, HubSpot's Marketing Hub is the finest software to release, manage and sustain your promotional campaigns and techniques. The key aspects of this software include easy contact management, a contact database, and the potential to sync data across sales teams, marketing, and customer service.

21. Paymo

A productivity tool that takes care of planning, scheduling, time-tracking, invoicing, and task management, Paymo is ideal for getting a synopsis of team performance.

22. Google Docs

Google Docs is a popular document storage and task management software that lets users to access, create, collaborate, and edit from anywhere, using their computer, phone, or tablet even when there's no connectivity.

23. Evernote

A note-making app helps you remember everything. Evernote is a perfect app to stay organized and get job done. Gather, organize and share notes from anywhere, so things are more accessible.

24. Zoom

It's a widely leveraged tool that offer cloud-based remote conferencing services, where over 500 people can participate in Zoom meetings.

25. Free

Free is a flexible messenger that can be merged with email and leveraged to share and store files seamlessly.

Top Project Management Metrics and Process Measurement Metrics

Project management metrics are valuable tools to get a handle on large projects. They help you visualize how you're doing and make course corrections as necessary.

We've organized a list of the top project management metrics you need to know and use.

Earned Value Management (EVM)

Earned Value Management (EVM) is the most common project management metric used in the construction industry. It is a performance measurement tool that allows you to understand where your project stands, how it performs, and whether it is on track to finish on time and within budget.

Estimate to Complete (ETC)

The ETC is calculated by multiplying the difference between your remaining work and actual work done by the average number of work hours per day.

For example: Let's say that you have 10 days left in your project, and so far, you've completed half of it. Multiply these two numbers together and divide by 2 (one full day). This will give you the estimated hours needed to complete the remaining tasks.

Cost Variance Ratio (CV%)

The cost variance ratio is calculated by taking the project's current cost and dividing it by the budgeted price of the project. The result is then multiplied by 100 to get a percentage value. This metric is typically used for IT organizations' tracking, control, and planning purposes.

Cost Variance = (Actual Cost to Date / Estimate at Completion) * 100%

Estimate at Completion (EAC)

EAC is used to help you understand how much longer your projects will take and how much money they will cost. This allows you to monitor them more closely and make adjustments if needed so that nothing slips past your deadline or budget.

Cost Performance Index (CPI)

Cost Performance Index measures the cost of work performed divided by the actual price. This metric is used to monitor the progress and performance of projects against budget. It is calculated as the ratio of actual costs incurred divided by budgeted costs.

This metric helps determine whether your project is on track or off track and how to fix it.

Schedule Variance Ratio (SV%)

The schedule variance ratio measures the difference between the planned and actual values of a schedule's critical path. It is calculated by dividing the total negative schedule variance by the entire planned duration of the project. The formula for the Schedule Variance Ratio is:

Schedule Variance Ratio = (Actual Duration – Planned Duration) / (Planned Duration)

Planned Value (PV)

Planned Value (PV) is a project management metric that tracks the estimated value of work completed during a given period. It shows how much of the plan has been implemented. It's calculated by dividing the budgeted cost of work scheduled for each task by the actual price of work performed on each job. PV helps measure performance against the planned budget and schedule and provides insight into areas where changes may be needed to meet target goals.

Cost Overrun Rate

Cost overrun is a measure of how much a project overran its budget. It's expressed as a percentage of the total cost that was planned. So, for example, if you had planned to spend £100,000 but spent £150,000, you could say that you were 50% over budget.

Actual Cost (AC)

The actual cost (AC) is what it costs to complete the project. This may not be the same as the original estimate (OE). For example, if you have a fixed price contract and work out what it will cost to do something, then do it and find out later that it was cheaper than expected, your OE will be lower than your AC.

Schedule Performance Index (SPI)

The schedule performance index measures the variance of the project's actual progress compared to the planned progress. An SPI above 1 indicates that the project is ahead of schedule. In contrast, an SPI below 1 indicates that the project is behind schedule.

Process Measurement Metrics

The best Process Measurement metrics should be simple, relevant, and something that a production team can easily use to improve.

These are the most important metrics to track when looking at the process involved in a business.

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a process improvement method. It is a set of tools and techniques used to measure and improve the quality of a product or service.

Six Sigma uses data analysis to find and eliminate defects in products and services. Six Sigma aims to reduce process variability, thereby increasing customer satisfaction, reducing waste, and saving money.

Cost of poor quality (COPQ)

The cost of poor quality measures the cost incurred by defects in production. This includes repairing imperfections after they've been discovered and the cost associated with finding and correcting defects before products are shipped.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a structured method for mapping customer needs and wants into specific product requirements. QFD helps companies better understand how customers view their products and services to improve them over time. Use this metric to identify areas where customers have problems using your products or services. Then, use that information to enhance your offerings over time.

Balanced Scorecard

The balanced scorecard is one of the most popular processes measurement metrics. It is a method used to measure and manage organizational performance. The balanced scorecard was first introduced by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in 1992. The Balanced Scorecard has four main perspectives: financial, customer, internal business processes, learning, and growth.

Business Process Reengineering

Business process reengineering (BPR) is a systematic approach to improving the efficiency of an organization's processes. This process involves redesigning business processes for more effective operation using strategic planning and technology solutions. BPR is "a structured methodology of analyzing an existing business model to improve its efficiency."

Conclusion

Incorporating the right mix of metrics into your team's workflow dashboard is essential. These metrics should align with your core values and business goals and be used to create a feedback loop that lets you improve at an organizational level. You're likely already collecting a fair number of metrics, but if not, this list will help get you started on the right path. As always, don't hesitate to adjust these measurements to suit your organization's unique needs.

Risk Management Approaches in Project Management

A risk can either be an Opportunity, i.e., a risk that brings a positive impact on project goals, or it may be a Threat, i.e., a risk with an adverse effect on the project goals. Accordingly, there are various approaches to dealing with positive and negative risks regarding project management.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the different risk management strategies in the project management domain.

Negative Risk Management Approach

1. Avoid

Avoidance eradicates the risk by eliminating the cause. It may lead to not performing the activity or uniquely performing the same. The project professional may also modify or isolate the goal that faces an obstacle.

Some risks can be eliminated by early data collection, enhancing communication between stakeholders, or leveraging expertise.

This risk management strategy includes extending the scheduling or modifying the project activity scope. Another instance could be a dangerous risk that may lead to life loss and is eliminated by shutting down the project altogether.

2. Transfer

In the Risk Transfer strategy, the risk is transformed to a third party like an insurance firm or vendor - paid to accept or tackle the risk on your behalf; hence the ownership and risk impact is borne by that third party. This payment is known as a risk premium. Contracts are signed to transfer the risk liability to the third party.

Risk Transfer doesn't eradicate the risk, but it minimizes the direct effect of the risk on the project. Few Transference tools are performance bonds, guarantees, insurance policies, warranties, and more. This technique is most effective in covering financial risk exposure.

3. Mitigate

Mitigation minimizes the probability of risk occurrence or reduces the risk effect within acceptable limits. This technique is based on the basic principle that earlier, the action taken to minimize the risk effect is more effective than repairing the damages after the risk happens.

An example of mitigating a risk includes leveraging innovative technology or top techniques to offer more error-free products. This strategy may need a model developed to estimate the risk level.

In the case where it isn't possible to minimize the risk probability, the risk effect minimization is focused on determining the connections that identify the risk depth.

4. Accept

Like the name, this strategy means accepting risks, especially when no other appropriate method is available to eradicate the risk. Acceptance can be active or passive. In the case of dynamic, a contingency reserve is built to recover the losses of resources, time, or money.

While passive acceptance needs no other action to expect to document the risk and leave the team to deal with the risks as they happen.

Positive Risk Management Approach

1. Exploit

Exploitation increases the chances of creating a positive risk, resulting in an opportunity. As a project professional, you're allocated sufficient and efficient resources to take advantage of this chance. This strategy minimizes the uncertainty linked with a positive risk by ensuring that it occurs.

2. Share

When the project team themselves aren't fully capable of taking advantage of the chance, they might call in another organization to ally. The expertise of this organization is used to increase the return of the opportunity. Examples of sharing opportunities include forming risk-sharing alliances, teams, different purpose organizations, or joint businesses. In this, all parties gains as per their action and investment.

3. Enhance

Enhancing involves increasing the probability of risk occurrence and expanding its effect. This is done by determining and influencing different risk triggers. An example of improving an opportunity is adding more resources to project activities to finish earlier.

4. Accept

Acceptance involves taking advantage of the positive risk as it occurs but not actively achieving it. This technique is just like an opportunity coming and being accepted without any pre-planning.

Contingent Risk Response Approach

These approaches are implied only when a specific event happens, and the execution of these approaches takes place under a particular predefined condition.

The team waits for appropriate warning signs before executing a contingent risk response. For example, these signs could be missing the target's work items or timelines. These approaches include staffing reallocations, implementing workarounds to reduce the loss, and financial reserves, repairing the damage to the extent possible, and preventing recurrence.

Top 25 PMP Exam Questions and Answers for 2022

Project Management Professional (PMP) accreditation is the world's leading project management credential. It captivates many enterprise and project professionals who wish to take their careers to the next level.

Given that you have stopped at this PMP exam questions and answers 2022 blog, we are guessing you are already familiar with the significance of the PMP credential. Hence, without much fuss, let's get started.

Top 25 PMP Exam Questions and Answers

Q1. Performing integration is a foundational skill for all project managers; the following describe the three different levels of performing integration EXCEPT:

1. Complexity level
2. Cognitive level
3. Process level
4. Context level

Q2. Web interfaces to scheduling and project management software, as well as electronic communications management, are examples of:

1. Internal management systems (IMS)
2. Project records databases
3. Project management information systems (PMIS)
4. Internal communications systems (ICS)

Q3. The process of validating resource availability and assembling the team required to accomplish project tasks is known as resource acquisition. Except for the above, the enterprise environmental factors that might impact this process typically include all of the following:

1. Personnel administration policies, such as those affecting outsourcing
2. Levels of competence, past experience, and cost rate
3. Political philosophy
4. The organization's structure

Q4. A primary function of a project management office (PMO) is to support project managers in a variety of ways, which will include all of the following EXCEPT:

1. Managing shared resources across all projects administered by the PMO
2. Identifying and developing project management methodology, best practices, and standards
3. Coaching, mentoring, training, and oversight
4. Intervening in project execution directly and without involving the project manager

Q5. A schedule compression technique used to shorten the schedule duration for the least incremental cost by adding resources is called:

1. Fast tracking
2. Crashing
3. Precedence diagramming method (PDM)
4. Program evaluation and review technique (PFRT)

Q6. You are managing a $10Mn project. For "re-baselining" the project, which of the following is an acceptable cause?

1. The client has approved an addition to the scope of the project with a $150,000 budget increase and a two-week extension of the scheduled completion
2. The contractor’s company has instituted a quality assurance program in which it has pledged to spend $1 million during the next year
3. The productivity in the design department is lower than estimated, which has resulted in 1,000 additional hours over what was budgeted and a forecasted two-week delay of the scheduled completion
4. The engineering department of the performing organization has converted to a new $250,000 CAD system

Q7. What is Configuration management focused on?

1. Identifying, documenting, and controlling changes to the project and the product baselines, while change control is focused on the specifications of both the deliverables and the processes
2. The identification and correction of problems arising in functional areas of project implementation
3. The specification of both the deliverables and the processes, while change control is focused on identifying, documenting, and approving or rejecting changes to the project documents, deliverables, or baselines
4. Testing new systems

Q8. What is the output of the Define Scope process?

1. Work breakdown structure (WBS)
2. Resource breakdown structure (RBS)
3. Project scope statement
4. Scope and schedule delays control plan

Q9. The precedence diagramming method (PDM) is defined as:

1. A time-phased graphical depiction of the arrow diagramming technique (ADM) that displays project activity durations and dependencies.
2. More accurate than the critical route approach for scheduling when the durations of project activities are unknown.
3. A technique for scheduling project activities that employ a probabilistic approach.
4. A methodology in which activities are represented by nodes and visually connected by one or more logical connections to illustrate the sequence in which the activities are to be done.

Q10. Parametric estimating entails:

1. Creating a cost estimate for project work by using a statistical link between relevant historical data and other variables
2. Defining project life cycle cost and duration parameters
3. Estimating the cost of the present project based on the actual cost of a prior similar project
4. Creating independent cost estimates for each work package and combining them to determine the final project cost

Q11. Which of the following statements is true about the work breakdown structure (WBS)?

1. The WBS is the bill of materials (BOM) needed to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables
2. The WBS is the same as the organizational breakdown structure OBS
3. The WBS is a simple list of project activities in chart form
4. The WBS is a hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to be carried out by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables

Q12. Project tailoring is an important consideration for most of the projects. Which of the following is the least likely project consideration?

1. Project manager’s skills and competency
2. Each project is unique
3. Addressing competing constraints
4. Level of project governance varies

Q13. Which is NOT true about tools and techniques of Perform Integrated Change Control?

1. They include project plan updates
2. They include change control meetings
3. They include expert judgment
4. A change control board (CCB) is responsible for meeting and reviewing the change requests and approving, rejecting, or other disposition of those changes

Q14. The following are some of the inputs to the Plan Communications Management process:

1. Stakeholder management approach, RAM, work breakdown structure, and administrative processes
2. Project management plan, project documentation, enterprise environmental variables, and organizational process assets
3. Organizational structure, stakeholder analysis, and communication obstacles in project management
4. Stakeholder requirements, project scope statement, budget, and timeline

Q15. The "fast tracking" approach of schedule compression entails the following steps:

1. The application of industrial engineering approaches to increase productivity, allowing the project to be completed sooner than anticipated
2. Performing operations or stages that are typically done in sequence in parallel for at least a portion of their duration, which may result in rework and higher risk
3. Implementing a "necessary overtime plan" in order to complete the project on time or sooner if possible
4. Assigning "dedicated teams" to key path tasks in order to meet project deadlines

Q16. Project Quality Management encompasses the methods for implementing the organization's quality policy into project and product quality criteria in order to:

1. Maintain control over products, services, and outcomes
2. Meet the project team's performance standards
3. Meet the goals of stakeholders
4. Enhance process capabilities

Q17. What does Portfolio management refer to?

1. The centralized management of one or more portfolios to achieve strategic objectives
2. Applying resource leveling heuristics across all the organization’s strategic objectives
3. Managing the levels of the levels of financial authority to facilitate
4. Project decision making

Q18. The Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) is:

1. Used to create the project budget and network diagrams
2. Created at the activity level and utilized to tightly connect project roles and responsibilities to project network activities
3. Used to show the relationships between work packages or activities and project team members. It guarantees that each work is assigned to only one person in order to minimize misunderstanding of responsibilities
4. Used in individual performance assessments of project team members to establish accountabilities and duties

Q19. During the middle of a technical project, a key team member is requested to shift to another project. This is a risky approach, according to the team, and they are concerned. Which action will help to resolve the issue?

1. Acknowledge the team’s concern and analyze the impact to the project
2. Discuss the conflict with the project sponsor and formulate a response
3. Use coaching tools and techniques to motivate the project team
4. Replace the key team member with a new resource who has the same skills

Q20. A component of the quality management plan, which explains how the organization's quality policies will be executed.

1. Project scope
2. Governance management plan
3. Project management plan
4. Program management plan

Q21. As an example of a mandatory dependence, consider the following:

1. A dependence developed based on knowledge of best practices in a certain application area
2. A dependence formed because of an unusual element of the project that requires a certain sequencing
3. To erect the superstructure only after the foundation has been completed for a construction project
4. On a software development project, begin design only when all project requirements have been completed and approved

Q22. Project managers spend most of their time communicating with team members and other stakeholders. In general, to effectively communicate, the project manager must perform all of the following tasks EXCEPT:

1. Calculating the potential number of communication channels accurately
2. Developing finely tuned skills using multiple methods of communication
3. Incorporating feedback channels
4. Seeking to understand project stakeholders' communication needs

Q23. Understanding, assessing, specifying, and managing needs are critical for achieving:

1. Customer expectations
2. The scope statements
3. Upper management
4. Functional requirements

Q24. All of the following are components of culture EXCEPT:

1. Values
2. Norms
3. Intelligence
4. Beliefs

Q25. Except -------------- for the following resource categories, activity cost estimate includes all of the following resource categories:

1. Labor
2. Materials
3. Equipment
4. Time constraints

Conclusion

Project management is the most prestigious profession, adding to the recent boom in project management roles and responsibilities in the job market. However, in a working space where more than 1Mn PMP certified professionals have proven their worth, one must be proactive in their approach.

Enroll in iCert Global's PMP certification training course to begin a successful journey in the project management field.

What You Must Know of Interpersonal Skills in Project Management

Having a professionally accredited project manager overseeing projects is crucial to ensure project success. That's because a certified manager has the training to display strong leadership skills, savvy negotiation notices, and top-notch communications talents.

There is a requirement for this gathering of interpersonal skills in project management as a project's success will depend on them.

The Team and Interpersonal Skills in Project Management

1. Communication

Communication is a crucial factor in a project's success. 90% of project tasks depend on communication, especially when leading a massive team. Leverage communication pacts during meetings, offer frequent feedback to stakeholders and teammates and provide routine status on project updates with higher-ups.

2. Negotiation

Project managers require to enforce their negotiation skills quickly. They must keep stakeholders and the team delightful, requiring frequent consultation. Ensuring both teams are satisfied and have a win-win scenario is significant. If not, there'll only be a lack of discontent and encouragement.

3. Decision-making

On most occasions, it's essential to involve the core team in decision-making. Other times, it isn't mandatory. The team anticipates a project manager to make decisions. Certified managers use their intellect to make certain decisions based on the quality, acceptance requirements, and schedule constraints.

Therefore, decision-making is crucial for a project's success as a single decision can either break or make a project.

4. Leadership

Leadership is another must-have interpersonal skill for a project's success. Without this skill, the project's plan and performance could become chaotic. The certified manager must step forward for action when the progress starts lagging, and teammates will follow a leader's path.

If the project manager slacks, team members slack, and if the manager outshines, so does the team. The team needs to consider one object the project manager put forward.

5. Team Development

If you are executing a long-term project, the probability is that you may require a massive team to perform it. Therefore, there needs to be teamwork to captivate the employees to work efficiently with each other and other stakeholders.

The project manager must play the leading part in team development and conflict resolution. While conflicts aren't always cynical, they could impact the accomplishment of project objectives.

A proficient with interpersonal skills in project management must build trust and be the supporter when advice and fair disagreement resolutions are required.

6. Motivation

It is the key to a project's success, and managers with motivation and team skills in the project management domain must encourage it. Teams require to be uplifted, pushed, and given the responsibility to accomplish success. When the team feels mentally or physically drained, that's when the project manager excels. 

Final Thoughts

To learn team and interpersonal skills in project management to lead a successful team, a certification in PMP is vital. In addition, the accreditation will be a booster when enforcing your reputation in a company or finding a lucrative position in another firm. Those ready to take a PMP certification can take iCert Global's training course, which is a sure-fire method to ensure the candidates are sharp and efficient.

Difference between Projects and Programs

When you hear the phrases "fully-funded project" or "fully-funded program," do you get a little excited? Do you think about all the possibilities for your project or program? Of course, both projects and programs will have requirements and expectations that must be adhered to for them to succeed. However, you should be aware of some critical differences between the two to make informed decisions about how to approach your project or program.

Projects and programs are two different types of tasks that your manager can assign you. Of course, depending on your job role, you may be required to complete various projects or assignments at work. Still, most of them probably don't require much planning upfront. However, with programs, whether for clients or internal to your company, every detail needs to be planned, and there's usually more room for error when it comes to project delivery.

Definition of Program

The program is a framework of work plans that includes a set of complementary projects organized in sequence to achieve economies of scale.

Programs are grouped into a single program when the benefits from their collection outweigh the benefits of managing individual projects. Programs are undertaken to improve overall organization performance by re-engineering business processes, changing management methods, etc.

Implementing programs requires laying down policies, procedures, and practices in a coordinated manner.

Definition of Project

More specifically, the term project can be defined as an activity focused on creating something new with a beginning and ending point.

It is an organizational unit dedicated to achieving a goal by creating a product within a certain amount of time, within budget constraints, and at or above performance levels desired by the project manager.

A project also includes routines and interlinked activities to reach a goal state. Once these routines are complete, they produce a final product ready for delivery to customers.

Projects vs. Programs

The differences between a project and a program are not just semantics. The difference is fundamental, and it's essential to understand it, especially if you plan to create a new project or program.

Here's what most people mean by the terms:

1. A project is a temporary effort designed to accomplish a specific goal in an agreed-upon time frame. The team must work together to meet their objectives within the given timeframe or risk failing and having their efforts wasted.
2. A program is a set of activities designed to produce a specific outcome over time. The movements may be repetitive or sequential, but they move toward a common goal that can be defined at the outset.

If you're creating a new program for your organization, consider using the following criteria when defining it:

Ease of execution: How easy will it be for others to follow? Is there enough structure so others can easily carry out the work? Is there enough flexibility so that you can adapt as needed?

Sustainability: Can this process be repeated without too much difficulty? Is it sustainable over time? Will it continue to deliver value once completed? Does it have room for growth?

The Critical Difference Between the Two

• A project is a period for which a set of activities are undertaken. A program is an ongoing activity to achieve goals and objectives, often over a long period.
• The program's scope is more significant than the project, which focuses on one functional unit; the program, on the other hand, addresses many different types of units.
• The project produces specific outputs needed for the organization to grow and survive. In addition, the program has general outcomes necessary for long-term success.
• To measure the effectiveness of a project, you can evaluate product quality, timeliness, cost efficiency, and customer satisfaction. First, however, you need to measure the effectiveness of a program by checking whether it fulfills the needs and benefits for which it was implemented.
• The project is content-specific, focusing on completing the necessary tasks. On the other hand, a program is context-specific, linking different projects together to achieve an overall goal for the organization.
• Project managers are responsible for the technical aspects of a project; they are in charge of ensuring the work gets done. However, the program manager is responsible for ensuring that the program is implemented successfully.

Conclusion

Here's a distinction that helps me keep things straight: Programs are long-term, multi-phase endeavors with the same basic specs and functions, or at least ones so related that they all share an underlying architecture. On the other hand, projects are short-term, customized initiatives designed to achieve short-lived and temporary purposes. That is, Programs have many phases, while Projects have a multitude of steps.

Both are executed on a timeline, with defined phases and steps to follow. Still, their similarities tend to run out there. Projects and programs serve an essential purpose in business, so it would be unfortunate to overlook either. But suppose you had to choose one or the other for your business. In that case, we believe that projects are generally far more beneficial.

Top 10 Topics to Concentrate for Ideal Success in PMP Exam

Project Management Professional (PMP) is the top-ranked globally renowned accreditation by Project Management Institute (PMI). This certification will improve your project management skills, expand your market reach, display your potential to tackle crucial projects to potential employers, earn you challenging projects, and increase your salary significantly.

The PMP exam consists of 180 combination-type questions covering the three domains - People, Process, and Business Environment. Content that spans the value delivery spectrum, including agile, predictive, and hybrid approaches, will be included across the three exam areas.

Earning your PMP certification is a commitment and one of the main reasons the certification is top-notch.

Top 10 Topics to Concentrate to Succeeded in PMP Exam

1. Project Risk Management

This topic focuses on controlling risks arising within the projects; the significant focuses of project managers in this approach are to plan risk management, determine risk, execute quantitative and qualitative risk analysis, plan risk responses, and monitor and control risks.

2. Project Cost Management

It is the process through which technology leverages to estimate cost and productivity throughout the lifecycle of business-level projects. It measures costs, determines the budget, and controls costs.

3. Project Time Management

Distributing and monitoring time in project management ensures project completion within the timeline. It monitors the time spent on a project and explains how much time will be spent on a specific activity within a project.

4. Project Communications Management

It's the process that ensures precise communication between stakeholders, teammates, product owners, and others involved with the project. The main focus of communications management is to determine stakeholders, plan communications, distribute information, manage stakeholders' expectations and report performance.

5. Project Scope Management

Project scope management includes two factors:

a. Relates to all the activities needed to complete and deliver a service/product.

b. Relates to the aspects and functions that characterize the product/service.

Hence, scope management includes the work criteria from the start to the end of a product/service.

6. Project Quality Management

This process ensures the end product or service quality within project management. Project quality management identifies quality regulations, goals, and responsibilities and manages to deliver quality service at the project end.

7. Project Integration Management

It's the process that ensures that all the criteria within a project are synchronized. It includes the integration of project plan development procedure, performs a function, and integrated change and control procedures. Each process has distinct sets of input and outcomes and unique tools and techniques used to execute the activities and change the input to output.

8. Project Procurement Management

The major focus areas of project procurement management are to plan, conduct, manage and control procurements.

9. Project Human Resource Management

It's determining and documenting roles, responsibilities, and required skills. Project Human Resource Management mainly deals with planning, staff acquisition, and team development. It ensures a planned and strategic method to manage a company's most relevant assets, and those are people involved in various projects.

10. Professional and Social Responsibility

The professional and social responsibility domain included by the PMBOK Guide in the PMP credential test study ensures individual integrity within a project. In addition, it improves self-professional competence and encourages stakeholder partnership.

These are the top 10 topics you must concentrate on for optimum success in the PMP exam. To better understand these areas and enhance your exam preparation, you can take the iCert Global's PMP certification online training course. You can also opt for PMP certification classroom training.

Are you looking to become a project manager? Gain the knowledge and skills needed to become a skillset through our Project Management Course.

Network Diagram: An Important Tool for Effective Time Management

When you start a project, you might be confused about how to prioritize the activities. The main confusion usually centers on figuring out the relationships among the activities.

You should set a logical connection among the activities so that everyone understands the nature and sequence of the project. It's also essential for your core project team to quantify dependencies among projects to work efficiently and accomplish their goals faster. 

Remember that some mandatory dependencies need to be considered during the planning stages—that's why we have network diagrams! There are three types of networks: activity on a node, activity on an arc, and precedence graph. 

Before getting started on one, we need to know how to prepare a network diagram and familiarize ourselves with its contents.

Network Diagram in Project Management

A Network diagram is a way of picturing what a project is and how the different steps relate to each other. Network diagrams represent a set of connected arrows and boxes describing the interrelationships between project activities.

 Boxes or nodes represent activity descriptions, and arrows show relationships among activities. The start and finish of each activity must be indicated, along with all other activities falling within these parameters.

There are many different ways to draw network diagrams; most project managers today use the precedence diagramming process (PDM) to mark their network diagram.

Types of Network Diagrams in Project management

The two primary network diagrams used in project management are the precedence diagram method and the arrow diagram method. Let's take a closer look at each one.

Precedence diagram method: The Precedence Diagram Method is a method for arranging activities on a timeline for use in scheduling and project management. 

The method is considered more efficient than other activity-based methods, such as the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). 

Each box in the diagram represents an activity, while arrows connecting them symbolize logical relationships between activities. There are four types of logical connections:

Finish-to-start: This is the most common form of dependency. It means you must wait until the predecessor's activity is finished before starting a successor's activity. 

For example, you can't begin the successor's training before ending the predecessor's unless your project employs a schedule compression technique. Likewise, you cannot start the following process in most cases until all predecessor activities are completed first.

Start-to-start: The activities of one person cannot begin until the predecessor's training is completed. 

For example, suppose A and B are both independent people. In that case, their activities might co-occur one after the other. However, if A and B are related to each other in some way—for example, they are both students or they work together at a company—their activities can depend on one another.

Finish-to-finish: The predecessor activity must finish before the successor activity can start. This relationship between activities is now used rarely in project management.

Start-to-finish: In this case, the previous activity will begin when the successor's movement finishes.

Arrow diagram method- it is a way to show the dependencies between tasks and tasks within a project. It helps show how changes in one job affect other tasks.

To draw an arrow diagram:

• Start by drawing each task on a separate paper sheet and connecting them using lines.
• Click these lines to the next job on the next sheet of paper.
• Continue until you have completed all of your tasks and connections.

This diagram shows how one task affects another: if Task A needs Task B to be done before it can start, then that means Task B needs to be completed first (and vice versa).

Advantages of Network Diagram

A network diagram visually represents the relationships between individuals, groups, and organizations. It provides information about the structure of an organization for decision-making purposes.

A network diagram often shows how this structure relates to other organizations. The goal of a network diagram is to provide visibility into the relationships within an organization so that decisions can be made based on this information.

Network diagrams have several advantages over other forms of organizational charts:

• They better understand how things work as they relate to each other.
• They are easier to read and understand than traditional organizational charts because they are not as complex.
• They are more effective at communicating relationships between individuals, groups, and organizations than traditional organizational charts because no hierarchy is involved. Instead, each person is represented as an individual node on the diagram with connections (lines) connecting them all.

Conclusion

The project management process is essential to every project, as it creates a transparent chain of tasks and events that need to occur to complete the project.

A simple network diagram can help planners see the big picture of what needs to be done and when. The application of the network diagram is broad and diverse.

For example, business process modeling, mapping business processes, and procedures relating organizational structure with interdepartmental relationships in the supply chain can be implemented using a project management network diagram.

The network diagram has a long history in both business and project management.

 Problems can occur, however, when the technique is misused or taken too literally. Many people and other networks need to be involved in accomplishing the goal.

 Misunderstanding this can lead to problems and failures. Instead, keep clear communication lines open on all levels, have reasonable expectations, and work with other members of your network toward a common goal. You will experience success in your network diagram over time.

Top 3 Reasons Project Management is a Top Career Choice

Irrespective of the industry, project managers are always in high demand to plan and provision the work. However, that is just the top-level project management view, which can be a challenging and rewarding career, but why project management career?

If you have pondered whether becoming a project manager is appropriate, this blog will illuminate the top 3 reasons why project management might be the best career move.

The Role of Project Managers

The fundamental project management principles include planning, organizing, monitoring, controlling, leading, and managing resources and activities to attain particular business objectives.

This personnel identifies strategies to start the project, evaluates and understands the project criteria, analyzes and gathers the needed workforce on board, and monitors the work progress.

Some of the other roles and responsibilities of project managers include:

• Set the work budget
• Decides how the task will be finished
• Manage the team and organization culture
• Leads meetings to track the progress of the project
• Decides which talent needed for the project
• Fix the schedule and deadline for the projects and subprojects
• Reports on the project progress to stakeholders

Shuffling multiple projects, activities, and schedules can be daunting, but with proper training and experience, professionals can learn how to handle this.

Methods Leveraged in Project Management

It's crucial to note that any business or workflow in the modern world will pace towards success only if it adopts the innovative forms of approaches that fit into the digital world.

In addition, project management has no predefined steps that can be followed hazily. Therefore, the goals of a project can be satisfied only when one or more effective project management approaches are applied.

Here are some well-adopted methods to perform the project management functions efficiently:

• Agile
• Scrum
• Lean
• Six Sigma
• Waterfall
• Kanban
• Extreme Programming (XP)
• Adaptive Project Framework (APF)
• PERT

Sectors Demanding Project Management

There are no limitations in the frequency of project management to a specific sector. However, there are distinct and various areas that demand the input of project managers, which are:

• Manufacturing
• Software and IT
• Marketing
• Insurance and financing
• Constructions
• Architecture and infrastructure
• Engineering

Top 3 Reasons Project Management is a Top Career Path

With the growing business procedures and the idea of expansion, there is a strong demand for professionals who have a greater understanding of the sector and streamline the method to attain definite project objectives.

This is where the role of project managers comes to light, making management a great career path. A professionally accredited person in this domain has a high chance of tempting offers that aren't only profitable for business goals but also to help satisfy personal gains.

Here are the top 3 reasons why choose a project management career:

1. Handsome Remuneration

The pay scale is the first thing we come across when applying for a job. Besides the salary payment, we check a few before enrolment, such as stability, incentives, and bonuses.

The positions in project management pave off very well. But, sooner or later, you'll notice a drastic progression in your designation and salary terms. According to Glassdoor.com 2022 survey, the average salary of an entry-level project manager is $88,907/year.

Your salary package shall increase with the years of expertise you gain as a project professional. Therefore, ensure that you grab the best opportunities if you have significant skills and ideal project management accreditation.

2. Communication Skills

Other than your technical skills, there is a vast space and opportunity to work on having excellent communication skills. The fundamental role of a project professional is to interact with several people in the business hierarchy. Therefore, there is no getting away from constant working mode on your communication to complete the task.

Discussions have to be modified according to the teams you interact with. For instance, communication will be different when speaking to a group from HR and interacting with a team from the IT department.

As a project professional, you can swiftly recognize the best course of action, formal or informal communication, keeping in mind the end goal.

3. Rising Demand

The demand for project professionals has been sky-rocketing ever since there was a drastic growth in the industrial and digital phase. Within the company, there's always a constant requirement for people with essential skills and proficiency, and this can be best fulfilled via project management.

Based on a survey from various reliable sources, it is estimated that by 2027, the project management jobs in different industries are expected to grow by 33%, which is approximately 22Mn new job roles.

Project management is a vast area to flourish, and you can explore to grow in different ways. You don't have to work in a specific organization, whether large or small-scale businesses; clients are available. The type of sector that you can access is also surplus. You have the fair means to get exposure to different work situations.

Conclusion

Constant learning is vital for your career development in the evolving job market. You have to learn more and develop unique skills and expertise for a better job landing. In addition, this will aid in making a shift from your existing firm to another industry or a specific type of project management.

Simply put, project managers with professional accreditation have the highest probability of receiving handsome remuneration and more opportunities for development than non-certified people. The two most common project management certifications are PRINCE2 and PMP.

iCert Global provides multiple project management training courses that can help project enthusiasts receive the certification education and real-world expertise beneficial for any project management career.

What is a Deliverable in Project Management?

When you're studying for the PMP certification exam, it's essential to learn about deliverables. A deliverable is an outcome produced by a project manager that meets a customer's or sponsor's needs.

Deliverables Defined

A deliverable is a piece of work/result that is produced by a project in the form of a product, service, or other outcomes. A deliverable falls under the project management deliverables, including the product requirements document, project proposal, project scope statement, and more.

Project deliverables and objectives are often linked but can also be different. For example, a deliverable is an item created to advance a project, whereas an aim is an overall goal.

For example, that would be an objective if you wanted to gain more insights into your market base. If you prepared a report to achieve this objective, that would be a deliverable.

Deliverables also differ from milestones, which are significant markers for completing a project or goal. You can move on to the next project stage or plan when you reach a milestone. With deliverables, however, you must submit the final product to an individual or team.

A deliverable is a key output for a project. It's something the client expects to receive once the project is complete. 

Deliverables can be one or multiple documents presented in a consistent format, such as an annual report or marketing plan. A deliverable often depends on another deliverable being completed first, which is common when managing projects with multiple milestones, such as events. 

Gantt charts can help you visualize and track interlinked deliverables.

But, deliverables are tangible action items you must deliver to complete a project.

Types of Deliverables

Internal deliverables aren't a part of the final product delivered to the client. Instead, they are internally developed to support a project to run and are only used by the project team. The final deliverables and the following activities, such as bug fixing and code testing, are based on completing the internal deliverables.

External deliverables are the items provided to end-users or clients. In the same example, the mobile application will be an external deliverable. Clients may also receive future updates and patches supporting the application's running smoothly.

Why are Deliverables Necessary?

A deliverable is a tangible result of a project. It can be anything from a report to a prototype to a final product.

Deliverables are essential because they help the project manager and team stay on track. For example, suppose you're managing a software development project. In that case, a deliverable might be a user story that has been completed and reviewed by all stakeholders.

You'll want to ensure that you have all of these deliverables organized in some way so that you can easily see what's been done and what needs to be done next.

If you're managing an IT project, deliverables might include:

• A list of features for each release.
• Detailed specs for each feature.
• A list of bugs or issues with each release.

Project Management and Deliverables

The terms "deliverable" and "project management" are often used in the same sentence. A deliverable is a product created by a project that helps achieve its goal. There are many methods to manage projects. 

For example, process-based management uses a phased approach, critical chain project management relies on a crucial chain, and product-based planning focuses on products instead of tasks. 

Regardless of the method used, the basic process is generally the same. The process groups include initiating, planning, production or execution, monitoring and controlling, and closing. In the initiating stage, the product breakdown structure – a hierarchy of deliverables – is created.

The responsibilities of each person are given according to the tasks they must do. In project planning, we identify the activities and deliverables needed to finish the project. 

Thus, we can create the schedule and budget for the project. When the tasks are executed, monitoring and controlling groups check that all the activities are done well and give maintenance as needed.

We can say the project is complete if all functions are appropriately finished and successfully meet all criteria.

Conclusion

The idea of a deliverable in project management is pretty straightforward. But, unfortunately, there isn't anything to it at all.

A deliverable is something you do at some point in your project and then give to someone else. This could be a report you write and then hand to another team member, or it could be a prototype or product you build for potential clients or for your internal use.

It doesn't matter whether it's physical or digital. It just matters that you go to the effort of making something, whatever it may be, and then give it to someone else as a part of your project.

Top 10 PMP Exam Questions and Answers for 2022

The Project Management Professional (PMP) is a globally renowned and recognized certification awarded by the Project Management Institute (PMI). And according to PMI, there are more than 1Mn PMP certified professionals globally, and the average salary for these professionals in the US alone is 25% higher than non-PMP certified individuals.

The exam consists of 180 combination-type questions covering the three domains - People, Process, and Business Environment. Content that spans the value delivery spectrum, including agile, predictive, and hybrid approaches, will be included across the three exam areas.

Earning your PMP certification is a commitment, which is one of the main reasons the certification is top-notch.

However, before PMP exam application, ensure you have met the following set of certification criteria:

• Education: high school diploma, an associate’s degree or global equivalent
• Leading project experience: 60 months
• Project management education: 35 hours

OR

• Education: 4-year degree
• Leading project experience: 36 months
• Project management education: 35 hours

Top 10 PMP Exam Questions

Q1. While managing a software upgrade project for your company you realize that your sponsor has high authority in decisions but low interest. What stakeholder management strategy should you employ to ensure the sponsor’s continued support?

1. Keep the sponsor informed
2. Manage the sponsor closely
3. Monitor the sponsor's actions
4. Keep the sponsor satisfied

Q2. While monitoring the baseline cost of a project, it is noted that the project expenses are higher than expected at this point. What is the most likely cause of this?

1. Excess inventory
2. Overestimated material costs
3. Lack of stakeholder support
4. An incomplete milestone lists

Q3. A company sets up a change control board (CCB) dedicated to the purpose of reviewing and evaluating the changes submitted for all projects. Which of the following best describes an individual or group that can request a change on a project in a situation where the project sponsor is a member of the CCB?

1. Project sponsor
2. Project team
3. Project manager
4. Any stakeholder

Q4. Alpha and Beta are two projects considered by a company. $50 million net profit is expected of Alpha and $45 million from Beta. Both are lucrative and rewarding projects, but the company can only invest in one of the projects. If Alpha is chosen, calculate the opportunity cost?

1. $5 million
2. $50 million
3. $45 million
4. $95 million

Q5. To reduce the defect rate of a manufacturing process, a project is carried out. The project team is carrying out QA activities to analyze and improve the process. Which of the following would be the most beneficial for this project?

1. Introducing the use of a Kanban board into the manufacturing process
2. Consulting with a certified Six Sigma Black Belt expert
3. Utilizing rolling wave planning for the project
4. Adopting a just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing process

Q6. You are part of a project team that’s designing a new type of vehicle. You are on the brink of getting started with working on a set of tasks (work package) for the braking system of the vehicle. You would like to assess the acceptance criteria before beginning the work. Where should you look in order to find this information?

1. Project management plan
2. Activity attributes
3. The WBS dictionary
4. Requirements documentation

Q7. Using an agile framework, you are to lead a product development project. You want to bring together stakeholders and SMEs to discuss risk, success criteria and other topics. What is the best way for you to accomplish this objective?

1. Facilitate an iteration retrospective
2. Conduct interviews with the identified individuals
3. Schedule a focus group
4. Invite the relevant participants to the daily scrum meetings

Q8. Being assigned as a project manager, you noticed during project execution that conflicts arise in the team on both technical and interpersonal levels. What is an appropriate way of handling conflicts?

1. Conflicts should be addressed early and usually in private, using a direct, collaborative approach.
2. Conflicts distract the team and disrupt the work rhythm. You should always smooth them when they surface.
3. A conflict should be handled in a meeting so that the entire team can participate in finding a solution.
4. You should use your coercive power to quickly resolve conflicts and then focus on goal achievement.

Q9. The organization’s leadership wants to include more agile methodologies in their projects. Before starting to take any agile approaches in a project, what is the first thing to be done?

1. Evaluate the organizational culture and transformation readiness
2. Conduct a survey of employees to find those willing to participate in agile projects
3. Conduct agile training for those in the team assembled for the pilot project
4. Put current projects on hold to readjust them to the new agile cadence

Q10. A project manager is quantifying risk for her project. Several of her experts are offsite but wish to be included. How can this be done?

1. Do a Monte Carlo analysis using the Internet as a tool
2. Apply the critical path method
3. Determine options for recommended corrective action
4. Apply the Delphi Technique

Conclusion

If you're considering working toward your PMP exam, iCert Global provides various project management courses that will help you pass, including the PMP certification training course. Our PMP courses are conducted by certified and highly experienced personnel.

What's stopping you from pursuing a project management career. Join us now and crack the PMP exam and interview with ease.

Happy learning!

WBS Approach to Project Management

As experienced project managers, we often come across various project management frameworks like the Waterfall model, Agile methodology, etc. However, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) approach sticks out among all the project management frameworks. It is a very reliable and helpful technique to manage projects efficiently and effectively. As the name suggests, one of the primary goals of WBS is to break down all the work activities in chunks or a detailed level which in turn helps project managers put their resources to work for the completion of their projects successfully within time and budget constraints. In other words, WBS helps create an organized plan that simplifies all the activities involved in completing a specific task.

What is the WBS approach?

The work breakdown structure (WBS) approach is a project management technique for managing any complex project, program, or portfolio. It divides the total amount of work to be done into smaller, more manageable parts.

The WBS is also called a hierarchical decomposition structure because it comprises several levels of detail. Each group in the WBS represents a different way of looking at the same information. The top-level items are called "work packages," which can be further decomposed into smaller parts.

The WBS approach focuses on what work needs to be done, not how it will be done. The process begins with identifying key deliverables and their relationships to one another.

Once these elements are defined, they're organized into a hierarchy, showing how they connect and how each piece relates to other components within the order. This approach allows you to see all relevant information without sorting through irrelevant details as you would with other project planning and management methods.

Why is a WBS important?

A WBS is a tool used in project management that helps define the scope of a project. It breaks down work into smaller components and allows you to plan, manage and control your project.

A WBS is sometimes called an Outline Scope Management Plan (OSMP).

Why use a WBS in project management?

The primary benefit of using a WBS is that it gives you a clear picture of what needs to be done and how much time it will take. By breaking down all tasks into smaller parts, you can see what is required to complete each task and estimate how long it will take. This makes it easier to plan your schedule and identify any risks or issues before they arise.

Another benefit of using a WBS is that it makes communication easier with stakeholders by providing an overview of the entire project. You can also use it when determining resource requirements for each task and assigning responsibility for each part of the project.

Characteristics of a Work Breakdown Structure

A WBS is a deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to be performed by a project team to achieve the project goals and create the required deliverables. The WBS dictionary defines, tracks, and manages all the elements in a WBS.

The following are properties of a work breakdown structure:

1. Deliverable-oriented: It organizes work into manageable components that can be scheduled and budgeted.

2. Hierarchical: It shows how the work is organized into levels, from top-level to lower-level activities.

3. Numerical: The numbering scheme for each level reflects its place in the hierarchy relative to other groups, which are:

• Numbers below 1,000 are used for top-level activities and significant milestones within intermediate activities.
• Numbers between 1,000 and 9,999 are leveraged for major components or subsystems within medium activities.
• Numbers more potent than 10,000 are used for minor components or subsystems within intermediate activities.

These continue until the lowest level, where all parts have unique identification numbers that reflect their position within their respective activity/sub-activity groupings.

The WBS Approach Help in Planning a Better Project

The WBS approach is a project management technique that can help you plan a better project. The WBS stands for Work Breakdown Structure, a way of breaking down larger tasks into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces are called work packages, assigned to specific people or groups within the organization.

The WBS approach is also known as the top-down method because you start with the end goal and then break it down into smaller goals until you get to the tasks that need doing on a day-to-day basis. This helps you understand what needs to be done, how long it will take, and who needs to do it.

While there's no one right way of using the WBS approach, there are a few different ways that you can use this technique when planning your projects.

Conclusion

The WBS is the foundation that helps all the team members know their responsibilities and ensure that the project will succeed. One must understand the importance of explaining what must be done in each project phase, who is responsible for it, by when and how to accomplish it.

One of the benefits of using a WBS is that it creates a different level of granularity, imposed on top of the original project scope, which helps you identify, organize and manage work. The most important thing is to create a common language between all team members.

In short, a WBS is a project overview that identifies the portions of the project that must be completed and by who, what resources are required to implement each piece, and gives a detailed list of all tasks involved in carrying out the project.

Understanding the Estimation of Activity Duration in Project Management

Pursuing project managers must understand how to perform various tasks to get a project started, and estimation of activity duration is one among them.

It isn't always a seamless activity to estimate project duration, as doing so requires a project manager's knowledge of a few theories, along with applying a few top techniques and practices.

Estimating activity duration is a daunting procedure that takes time for a long-term project. Ideally, it would be best to involve your core team in the estimation process.

It would help if you involved them, who will work on the project to attain the goal, the project management team, and all identified stakeholders to make a consensus on the target dates, and delivery schedules.

Estimating activity duration can be transformed as work progresses and as new activities of the projects are identified. Firstly, you can evaluate your project depending on the network diagram and can be further changed based on project changes done during the execution, controlling, and monitoring of the process.

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), there are some project management practices, techniques, and tools to estimate the activity duration, and they are as follows:

Parametric Estimating

Parametric Estimating is more precise and is based on a statistical calculation of historical data and other variables. For instance, in the design stage of a construction project, you may already have the activity duration, i.e., cutting 1,000 stones will take 8 hours.

If your project is similar to one executed before, it's worth your while to determine existing activity duration estimates and previous data from the past project.

Heuristic Estimating

Heuristic Estimating is called Rule of Thumb, where you can roughly guess that the whole design stage can take 45% off your entire project time. This is a fruitful method for knowing factors where you can place an imaginary figure depending on the experience.

Analogous Estimating

Analogous Estimating is a vital technique that offers you the whole duration estimation. Depending on similar projects, you can attain a ballpark view of the entire duration estimation.

You can also get this data from the Project Management Office or other project managers and use this template for your existing project. Though this estimation practice isn't so precise in nature; however, it's less expensive and less time-consuming than other techniques.

You can often leverage Analogous Estimating when you don't have enough time to undergo a proper estimation and have a timeline. This can be a part of the project, so you don't need to estimate the whole project.

You can estimate the activity duration for a single stage if the phase requirement is identical to the last processed project.

Three-point Estimating

Three-point estimating depends on considering several choices such as resource assignments, uncertainty, and the associated risk like the best and worst scenario-based. This estimating technique originated from PERT, and through PERT, we estimate three kinds of estimation:

1. Most Likely (M)
2. Optimistic (O)
3. Pessimistic (P)

Most Likely is based on the resources assigned, Optimistic is based on the best scenario-based analysis, and Pessimistic is based on the worst scenario-based analysis. Once you have these three durations, you can leverage some valuable formulas to derive the expected duration, i.e.,

TE = (O + 4M + P) ÷ 6

Where, TE = expected time

In this way, you can understand the significance of PERT in estimating the duration of the project.

Reserve Analysis

This is a type of contingency reserve, where after fixing a schedule for each activity level based on the activity features, you can create reserve timing by adding a few percent to the derived program of each activity. It can be modified as work progresses, minimizing or maximizing depending on the scenario.

Final Call

Estimating project activity duration can help you manage the project that comes in on time and within budget. Understand from the lessons your company has already dissolved to save yourself time when doing duration estimates.

To learn more about successful project management, look to iCert Global's online PMP certification training course.

10 Most Widely Used Project Management Apps Compared

Today, we will discuss a project management application and how it can benefit a company. Moreover, we will look at the top 10 widely used project management apps.

Businesses work on diverse projects at the same time. They form teams of employees and assign them to experts who take the responsibility of ensuring the successful completion of the project. This brings numerous tasks to be completed well-organized and within their assigned timelines.

A project planning application aids in managing projects in one integrated platform to ensure the progress visibility of each project.

All facts are equally significant when executing a project, whether budget management, ensuring the teammates' collaboration, or managing the involved resources. For example, designating a task to members, reviewing the work assigned a status, keeping track of deadlines, ensuring the ease of communication, and allowing the leaders to ensure that the tasks are completed on time.

What are the Best Features of Project Management Apps?

The project management app is focused on enhancing the productivity and efficiency of the team members, thus enhancing the overall quality of the project.

Before selecting the management app for your company, here are 5 features an ideal app must offer:

1. Let team leaders discuss the app's platform and direct messages privately and collectively to the teammates.
2. Capable of sending a notification to the members over SMS/email, so they don't have to log in to the app to check the updates.
3. Must facilitate document storage in a core database that should be accessible by all the members. Moreover, the documents can be password protected to ensure document privacy.
4. A mobile app must be offered so that team members working remotely can access the project management system seamlessly and comfortably.
5. Visualizations help in viewing the progress of multiple projects running at the same time. To show the deadlines, visualizations in the form of Gantt Charts are superior.

Top 10 Project Management Apps

The workflow enhances as the project management apps offer a common platform for all the teammates to collaborate over, thus, ensuring teamwork, increasing productivity, and ensuring the success of each project.

With this, let's see the top 10 widely used project management apps:

1. JIRA

This is the most used app by several companies that work on the Agile SDLC principle. The teams can develop Kanban boards, personalize scrum boards, and leverage real-time reporting facilities. Moreover, JIRA can quickly resolve if a bug is tracked down.

2. Zoho Projects

This free management app comes with all the typical features of any other software app. It enables Gantt charts to merge with other platforms, an entire built-in tracking system, and lets basic reporting abilities. In addition, Zoho Projects is cloud-based and works excellent for mid-scale organizations.

3. ASANA

This is one of the top-notch project management apps available. It enables the use of conversations and dashboards. In addition, the TEAM PAGES can be leveraged to share messages with the whole team.

There is also a smart box that displays the relevant notification to each team member. Further, ASANA can seamlessly collaborate with other data sources such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Github, and more.

4. Wrike

It is a cloud-based, free project management app that can easily be collaborated with Excel, Google Apps, and other software. Users can create, view, and edit documents directly from the email ID. Wrike is available for smaller teams and supports the best use of Google project management tools.

5. Trello App

It is a popular visualization tool that aids teams in project management by providing multiple means for optimization. This app follows the Kanban system, a popular technique leveraged in lean management. With the Trello app, you can seamlessly organize all your projects on boards with data broken into categories like:

• Who is doing what?
• The progress of the specific project
• What is being worked on?
• Timelines and time spend on each project at each phase

The Trello app stands out because it provides free services in addition to paid ones. Moreover, the app is mobile-friendly, making it easy to work and update your project data.

6. Basecamp

It is a popular project management app that provides several collaboration facilities. People can put their comments in an assigned area meant only for discussion. Updates can be sent through emails. However, it isn't possible to add timelines for each activity in the Basecamp app.

7. Microsoft Project Management Software

It is one of the top-class project management apps and has been in the field for around three decades in several forms. MS Project is widely leveraged for complex projects, enabling robust reporting potentials, and can be used to develop built-in and personalized reports - extracted to a PowerPoint slide. However, this app is mainly used by trained experts who know how to extract the best from the MS Project software.

8. Nifty

It is a collaborative platform to plan your project, team & stakeholder communication, and automation of project-progress reporting. This app does a fantastic job merging multiple tools to encompass the whole project cycle.

The projects can be managed via Kanban-style tasks linked with targets. Another top feature is the Project Overview, which offers a birds-eye view of all the project progressions. Moreover, the team chat widget lets communication while working in any pocket of the Nifty app.

9. Hive

This app offers a productivity tool that will allow the teams to manage projects in the best way for them. Hive app supports multiple project layouts such as Calendar, Gantt chart, Kanban board, or table. A feature of Hive is that you can easily collaborate with your team by sending messages to groups/individuals.

This tool offers the potential to plan and schedule your team's time for existing and upcoming projects. Moreover, Hive offers several other features such as time tracking, automated workflow, and action cards.

It also has the feature of sharing files, which you can directly upload to a project, message, or task.

10. Freshservice

It is a complete project management app that offers greater collaboration, where you can align your IT to business targets. It offers several features to manage IT projects from scratch, such as:

• Offering task management to organize projects to tasks and nested sub-tasks
• Can set multiple SLA policies to create task timelines
• You can bounce ideas off each other via collaboration, sharing context across teams, and brainstorming ideas.

Conclusion

With several options available, choosing the best project management app for your company becomes daunting. The software available more or less has similar aspects, but the way these features are packed makes the difference. Several elements, such as team size, aspects of the task management software, etc., should be considered when finalizing one management app.

Having the right project management app is crucial in achieving overall project success. Hence, before going for any app, you should look for the aspects that you think will be valuable for your business and make the right choice.

An Ultimate Guide to Interactive Vs. Push Vs. Pull Communication in Project Management

The terms interactive, push, and pull communication have been used in project management for many years. Unfortunately, they are often used interchangeably, thus making it confusing for us to use the correct method in our everyday work. We need to understand them well because they can help us improve our overall communication strategy, and they can assist us in maximizing the potential of our projects. Let's understand these three communications:

Interactive Communication

Interactive communication is the most common type of communication. It involves two parties exchanging information back and forth, such as an email or a phone call. This type of communication is mainly used in project management to request updates from team members, provide feedback, and receive updates.

When to use interactive communication?

Interactive communication is best suited when you want to exchange information or ideas between people already working together on a project or task.

You can use it to brainstorm ideas, solve problems, make decisions, give feedback and encourage creativity.

However, suppose you need to share information between teams that don't yet trust each other (or don't know each other well). In that case, interactive methods might not be ideal because they might cause confusion or misunderstanding.

Push Communication

Push communication is a specific type of interactive communication where the sender sends information to everyone on the team at once. This can be done through an email blast or an announcement in a group chat room.

The purpose of this type of communication is to provide important information that everyone needs to know right now. Push communications are generally sent at the end of each day or when something significant happens during the day (such as a major change in schedule).

They're also used when there's a need for urgency or immediacy, such as when there's an emergency or critical issue that needs immediate attention from all team members.

When to use push communication?

Push communication is best suited for sending urgent or essential information to everyone at once. This is the best option when you need to send an email or make a phone call. For example, if you want everyone on your team to know about a schedule change, you can use push communication.

Examples of push communication:

Slack Messages: Slack messages are sent by default to all members of the channel they are sent in. If you want it sent privately, send it with direct news instead.

Email: Emails can be marked as high priority (which will get them through spam filters) or urgent (which will result in them being read immediately).

Phone Calls: Phone calls can be placed on hold and transferred instantly so multiple people can hear them simultaneously.

Pull Communication

Pull communication involves one person sending out an invitation or announcement, such as when they need help completing tasks or want feedback on something they've done. Managers typically use this to get employees' input on project proposals or presentations before they are finalized.

When to use pull communication?

Pull communication works best when you're managing many people or projects. It's an efficient way of ensuring everyone is on track without wasting their time with unnecessary questions.

You might want to use pull communication:

• When you have a lot of people working on a project who don't report directly to you.
• When you need regular updates from your team.
• When someone has been given an assignment that requires them to work independently.

Takeaway Point

Interactive communication is the most efficient form of communication.

Communication is a crucial part of project management. It's hard to succeed without it.

Project managers use many different types of communication, such as emails, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings. But which kind of communication is the most efficient?

Interactive communication is the most efficient form of communication in project management. It allows you to engage with your audience directly through instant feedback and questions.

It's not just about what you say; it's about how you say it. The best way to interact with your audience is through a tool like Slack or Skype that allows for real-time collaboration and quick responses from other team members.

The advantages of interactive communication are endless:

• You can engage with your audience at any time or place
• You don't need to wait until someone's available to answer your question — they'll be able to respond immediately through the tool itself (or by email if necessary). This means you'll get an answer immediately instead of having to wait around all day for someone to get back to you.
• You can share documents easily using tools like Google Drive and Dropbox, which makes working together much more Spartan than sending attachments back and forth through email.

Conclusion

We hope we've been able to clarify some things for you in regards to push, pull, and interactive communication. One thing that remains constant, however: no matter which type of communication your team uses, as long as your team members stay on the same page and follow through with their agreed-upon responsibilities, you'll be able to run a successful project. The most important thing? Make sure everyone on your team is committed to the project's success! Good luck! And thanks for reading.

What is Risk Assessment in Project Management?

Risk is an inevitable factor when it comes to project management. And the last thing any project wants to face is risks. However, projects are created to take advantage of opportunities and resources, and with these come uncertainty, risk, and challenges. 

Therefore, risk management becomes a vital aspect of all project success. The project risk management plan addresses the procedure behind risk management, and its assessment meeting lets the project team determine, categorize, prioritize, and alleviate these risks ahead of time.

However, in any project, risk assessment is not a project manager's sole responsibility. Therefore, managers must conduct a special meeting to bring in the ideas of the whole team or, at a minimum, the following:

• Project managers act as the chairperson and enable the risk assessment meetings.
• The project manager must dedicate the roles of recorder and timekeeper to the project team members.
• Key stakeholders may bring value in determining project risks and alleviation & avoidance master plans.
• Subject matter professionals are specialists in certain project activities; however, they aren't formally assigned to the project but add value.
• The project sponsor may participate based on the project scope and size.

Phases of Risk Assessment in Project Management

In several projects, risks are determined and evaluated randomly. This is often malignant to a project's success, as unexpected risks arise that must be dealt with on an emergency basis instead of being prepared for and defended against in an estimated fashion.

Potential risks must be determined, categorized, measured, and documented. Rather than looking at the risks randomly, finding threats and grouping them into categories is much more efficient.

Below are the five phases of risk assessment during project management:

1. Identification of Risks

Before diving into risk assessment, the project manager will have fulfilled a list of risks from prior project experiences. These will be reviewed during the start of the project as a method of identifying a few common risks.

This will also offer a meaningful insight to the teammates to predict potential risks. While there are several techniques to identify risks, the Crawford Slip practice is one of the most common and effective methods.

Each risk found and discussed should be stated in a complete sentence that states the risk cause and the impact that the risk has on the project.

2. Categorizing and Grouping of Duplicates

Categorizing risks is a path to systematically identifying risks and offers a foundation of awareness, understanding, and action. Each project has its structure and difference.

Categorization makes it seamless to determine duplicate risks and prompts for identifying additional risks. The most common and efficient technique is to post the sticky notes on a large board where the manager has posted categories.

The participants then put their risks beneath the relevant category on the board. As they find the same risks, they stick the duplicates on top of each other. The manager then discusses the risks under each section with the participants. Once all the risks are identified, categorizing should be documented for stakeholder approval.

3. Qualifying Risks

Significant questions to assess any risk in projects are:

• What is a risk? How can I recognize the risk if it becomes a reality?
• What is the probability of the risk happening? Is it High, Medium, or Low?
• How serious a threat does it show to the project - high, medium, or low?
• What are the signs that project managers must look for?

A risk assessed as highly likely to occur and having a high effect on the project will require closer attention than a low risk in terms of both impact and probability.

4. Determining Risk Response

For the risks which have been determined with a higher risk score, the users will identify the signs or causes and find responses. Responses include:

• Adding the risk to the project plan and scheduling it.
• Adding funding to the project to alleviate any possible rise in expenses.
• Adding resources to the project to lessen any likely scarcity of dedicated resources.
• Creating an action course to eliminate or avoid risks.

5. Risk Documentation

The project manager will enter all the risks, responses, and probability-effect scores and maintain a document to explain them. The high-scoring risks will be added to the project management plan, and the document will be included as an appendix to the management plan.

Moreover, these high score risks will be added to the schedule to track the risk at the right time. Though these risks are added to the schedule, it isn't necessarily modified. This method offers visibility and awareness to the individuals of all high-scoring risks throughout the project lifecycle.

Top 16 Qualities of a Good Manager and a Leader

What are the qualities of a good manager? A leader, for that matter? How about someone who both manages and leads? You don't often find a single person who excels in both, but it happens. So if you work and want to develop skills in either of these two areas, this article is for you.

Vision

A good manager and leader have a vision for the future of their business or the world. They see where they want to go and understand what it will take to get there. They also have a clear idea of how they will get there. This is important because it allows them to make decisions based on facts, not wishful thinking.

Vision doesn't mean that you have to be able to predict precisely what will happen in the future; it just means that you know where you're going and why. For example, knowing where your company should go next is essential when deciding what technology to use or how much money to spend on marketing.

Positive

A good manager can identify and understand the needs of the people they manage. They should also be able to motivate employees to seek out opportunities to improve their skills and performance. A good manager will also help you find ways to work together as a team, be flexible, and deal with problems when they arise.

A good leader has all these qualities but doesn't just tell people what to do; instead, they inspire them by making them feel like they have the best interests.

Leadership

A good manager is a leader. A great manager is an exceptional leader. A great leader can inspire others and help them to reach their full potential while at the same time encouraging them to work together in a positive environment.

Leadership is about being able to motivate people and get them excited about achieving something significant. A good manager will be able to help you manage your time effectively and make sure that you have the resources available for you to achieve your goals.

Confidence

Confidence is a quality that most people desire in their managers and leaders, and it's one of the top qualities of a good manager. Confidence comes from knowing what you're doing, having experience, and having the ability to do it well. Great managers know they have the skills to lead, and they use those skills to help their team succeed.

When you're confident about your decision-making abilities and leadership skills, it makes things easier for others on the team. They know that if they ask for help or advice, they will get it without hesitation or fear of being judged as incompetent or weak.

Communication

Communication is critical in any workplace. A good manager or leader can help employees feel respected and understood while providing feedback and guidance.

Communication should be open and honest, with a positive tone. If you are communicating with your team members, try to avoid using words such as "must," "have," or "have to." Instead, use positive words like "I would like" or "I think."

Honesty

Being a good manager and a leader means being honest with your employees and your team. This doesn't come naturally to everyone, but it is an essential quality for a great leader. Honesty is one of the most critical skills as a manager.

Honesty also means being honest with yourself. It would help if you didn't deceive yourself when deciding how to lead your team or manage their performance. If you constantly lie to yourself about whether or not something is working out or if there are other options available, then you're doomed from the start because nobody will ever believe anything you say!

Open-mindedness

A good manager needs to be able to listen, think and learn. He needs to be open-minded to be receptive to new ideas and ways of doing things. The best managers are open-minded enough to accept new ideas from their employees. They also should be able to see the strengths in their employees and recognize their weaknesses, so they can work together to improve on those weaknesses.

Sense of humor

A sense of humor is an essential quality in a manager. People need to be able to laugh at themselves and their mistakes and also laugh at others' jokes. This is a great way to build co-workers' trust, morale, and camaraderie.

When you're having fun with your team, they're probably having fun too. This can lead to a more productive work environment and a better team overall.

Team player

A good manager and leader put the needs of their team above her own needs. They are always thinking of ways to improve their team and know how to get the best out of their team members.

A good manager and leader is also someone with strong leadership skills, which means they can make decisions confidently and handle conflict well.

Creativity

Creativity is one of the most essential and exciting qualities of a good manager and leader. A great manager and leader not only knows how to manage but also knows how to inspire other people to do their best work. In addition, a creative manager can develop new ideas for improving processes and procedures or making the workplace more attractive for employees. This can improve productivity, morale, and employee satisfaction.

 Decision-making ability

The ability to make decisions is an essential quality for a manager. A good decision-maker understands what needs to be done, when, and how it should be done. As a result, the best manager can make the right decisions for the organization and its people.

A good leader also has an excellent decision-making ability. They can see the big picture and how all parts of the organization fit together to reach a common goal. This ability enables leaders to understand problems from different angles and develop solutions that will benefit everyone involved in the organization.

Willingness to learn new things, adaptability to change, and flexibility.

Great managers are willing to learn new things, adapt to change, and be flexible.

They have the ability and willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done. They are not afraid of failure or doing things differently than what has been done before. Leaders can see past their ego and focus on what is best for the company or team they lead.

Optimism for the future

Optimism is a good quality to have as a manager and leader. Seeing the glass half full and being optimistic about your team and the future will help you get the best out of them.

One of the biggest problems with managers is that they can be negative about everything, which can cause them to lose their employees' faith. This can lead to poor performance, disengagement, and ultimately dismissal.

Do not underestimate the power of optimism in your life and your business.

Commitment to the organization and its staff members

The best managers and leaders can be committed to their organization and its staff members. But, to be successful, they must be able to inspire others through their words, actions, and deeds.

Good managers and leaders are committed to the organization's goals, mission, vision, and values. In addition, they take pride in their work, which is evident in how they present themselves in front of others.

A good manager and leader delegate assignments for growth and development

A good manager and leader is a good listener and understands the need of employees to grow professionally. In addition, good managers and leaders are transparent with their employees and keep them informed about their role in the organization.

A good manager and leader have integrity which means they follow ethical conduct in/her work environment. They do not compromise with any unethical behavior in/her organization or workplace. A good manager and leader always try to keep things on track by following the rules of the organization that they work for.

A good manager and a leader reward and recognize accomplishments

A good manager and a leader treat all employees equally regardless of their position or level in the company. A good leader knows their team members well enough to recognize who is doing well and who needs help improving on something.

A good manager knows how to delegate tasks effectively and efficiently because he understands his employee's strengths and weaknesses, while a suitable leader delegates tasks based on their ability to do them correctly without having to be coached every step.

Conclusion

To be an effective manager and leader, you must have unique qualities that separate you from the rest. You're responsible for leading a group of people. As such, your leadership skills will dictate whether or not you can effectively do your job. So, what are some key characteristics that make a good manager and leader? As with most things, knowing yourself and understanding your strengths and weaknesses is essential. Move through each of these characteristics, then decide which ones would make you a better manager and leader, given who you already are in today's business world.