Ensure vendors can meet their commitments.

Be a good customer. Don't pressure your vendors into making commitments they can't keep in order to protect their sale. Seek a win-win relationship. Ensure vendors can meet their commitments by not allowing over optimistic vendor estimates to compromise the project.

Have formal project team meetings.

Have regular and formal project team meetings, not ad hoc status meetings. Always have an agenda, start on time and end on time, and report on deliverables and progress. Assign tasks, responsibilities and publish mimutes of the meeting. Take advantage of collaboration platforms to involve remote team members.

Justify the project by building a strong business case.

Demonstrate a compelling case for the project by providing a comprehensive view into the costs, benefits, and risks of the project. Ensure that the project benefits are provided by the user, not a project manager guestimate of likely benefits.

Ensure flexibility within structure.

Ensure the project management process provides flexibility within structure. Project type scalability enables shorter term projects to be fast pathed following higher level steps, while at the same time allowing longer term more complex projects to fully utilize the entire project management process.

Develop a mentor program.

Have a mentor for every skill set and asset employed by the project office. Mentors can play a vital role in project management maturity and can be assigned by project management process area, knowledge area, and tools and technology employed.

Don't underestimate the value of project management training.

Project management training can provide a tremendous return on investment. Invest in training most likely to make measureable improvements to the bottom line. Don't attend, rather participate in project management training. Set as an objective, not just to learn the course material covered, but to apply the knowledge into your project management processes so all participants can benefit.

Don't overestimate the value of project management training.

Project management training vendors provide a wide variety of courses and delivery methods. Often times, the topics presented may not be useful or even usable in the context of the attendee's workplace. Ensure that project managers and project team members attend training that can be effectively applied in the workplace.

Don't engage in hero worship.

Hero worship is a tale-tale sign of ineffective processes and management controls. Fix the process and you fix the problem. Recognize your heros privately and motivate them to share information, skills, and techniques. Publicly praise and reward them when they contribute to the organization's process and capability maturity.

Act upon lessons learned.

A compelling business case driver of project management processes is the ability to act upon lessons learned. Rather than simply filing lessons learned, ensure that lessons learned feedback is not only acted upon, but communicated as well. Make use of department meetings, process owner meetings, and other techniques such as email and team portal announcements to communicate project management process improvements.

Periodically update project selection scorecards.

Most organizations have fiscal year objectives and quarterly measurements. As the needs and priorities of the organization change, periodically update the project selection scorecard to reflect these changes so that project ideas are aligned to the needs of the business.

Establish individual performance plans independent of project assignments.

Ensure every employee has a individual performance plan. Use the indiviual performance plan to set work responsibilities and performance ratings based upon results achieved. Review quarterly for marginal performers and at least once a year for all performers.

Develop a strategy to ensure retention of the top 5% performers within the project management office.

Whether your project office is large or small, ensure that you do not lose your top contributors and performers. Ensure that your top performers know that they are valued as top performers and not taken for granted. Develop long term, three to five year, strategies with them to ensure they can continue to grow and be challenged in the organization.

Develop a strategy to move up or out the bottom 5% performers within the project management office.

Identify marginal performers and ensure they know their end results achieved are marginal. Develop improvement plans and strategies with measurable objectives. Ensure that adequate processes and tools are in place to support the employee's work efforts. Often times, marginal performers can mature and develop into strong performers. That is always the best route.

Be realistic.

Always be realistic about the number of projects your organization can successfully manage.

Require a formal change request process.

Do not allow casual scope creep or accept casual changes to project scope. Always follow a formal change request process and obtain acceptance of the change request by both the sponsor and the project management office authority.

Establish a risk management process.

Ensure that projects have an adequate level of risk planning. Anticipate risk events and provide mitigation strategies for those events. Even relatively simple and short term projects can face project risk that if unplanned for can result in project failure. Seek to balance the level of risk with the level of risk planning.

Ensure project management processes are intuitive and can be used effectively by casual project managers.

Many organizations are seeing an increasing number of casual project managers as well as department managers and staff engaging in project management. Be mindful to ensure that project management processes are intuitive and can be effectively used. Allow users to use the tools and technologies that they already have and already know.

Choose the right people for the project.

Choose people who can bring insights and information to the project effort, not just those that are available.

Use portfolio management techniques to align the project portfolio to differing risk/return strategies.

Seek to be well balanced, but take advantage of high return/high risk projects as a normal an expected part of the portfolio mix.

Provide a project management template library.

As an integral part of the project management process, provide a project management template library. Anticipate common project management templates, forms, and checklists and make them easy to access and use. As new document requirements come about, update the project management process and template library to ensure compliance as well as to maximize productivity of the project management team.

Encourage immediate reporting of bad news.

Don't shoot the messenger and don't shoot the cause of the problem (if there is one). Be mindful to not discourage immediate reporting of bad news. It is better to know early that a problem exists and fix it than to find out well after the fact.

Be extra careful with new technologies.

New technologies represent significant risk for both the technology provider as well as the project team. If anything can go wrong, it usually will.

Use effective gating techniques to keep projects on track.

Ensure project gating processes provide conditional approvals that enable the management authority to approve the project to proceed with minor revisions noted. Without such approvals, the project effort might be slowed down unnecessarily should the project team be required to reschedule a gate review meeting prior to advancing the project effort to the next step of the project management process.

Develop a comprehensive project plan.

Develop a project plan that will meet all project objectives. Clearly identify objectives that can not be met.

Terminate failing projects as early as possible.

Most organizations have projects underway that are failing and will not complete. Often, projects are allowed to run their course until funding is expired, time has lapsed, or resources are needed elsewhere. Don't wait for an outside and unrelated event before terminating a project surely to fail. Early termination can allow for more effective use of resources and costs savings.

Be cognizant of the special challenges of international projects.

Before commitment of a project team to a term engagement in country, be certain that they understand and can fulfil the engagement. International projects can often involve working and living in difficult conditions. From language related difficulties to weather, culture, infrastructure, polution, and physical safety, ensure all members of the project team can effectively work and stay the course.

Watch for signs of burnout.

If the project manager or member of the project team is truly burned out, take action to immediately replace the individual. Usually, burnout is not recoverable and left unchecked it can thwart the entire project effort.

Work as a team.

Seek ways to work as a team and keep the project on track. When project team members operated independent of one another and in a disjoint fashion, the product of the project often appears just as disjointed.

Manage temporary project resources very closely.

Temporary project resources that are called in to do special tasks or short term functions are not always able to fit in with the project culture. Often they do not read the project plan. Don't expect their priorities to be the same as the project's priorities. Ensure their tasks are correctly carried out and performed on time.

Use factual descriptions instead of judgments.

For example, "The pages in this report are out of order!" is less aggressive and threatening than, "This report is sloppy!"

Create a blame free zone to facilitate process improvement.

Look for ways to improve a process rather than blame a person or department. Even when the blame lies with the person or department, seek to address process defects that resulted in the problem. For example, if the individual made a mistake on account of not knowing how to properly us a tool or system, address the process defect that resulted in a user not having the requisite skill or the tool not having the requisite user instructions.

Listen, Listen, and Listen some more.

Take the time to listen attentively to both the words and the feelings. Seek to explore ideas rather than to debate, argue, attack, and defend.

Prepare for presentations, don't wing it.

Preparation is the key. Prepare yourself. Prepare the material. Prepare the presentation. Practice important presentations to a team member, manager, or even your spouse.

Stress is good.

On the job stress is normal, healthy, and helps get the job done. Reactions to stress can vary greatly from one person to another. Learn to deal with stress in a positive manner. Manage stress like you would a project.

Manage time effectively.

Learn to identify and address activities that take up most of your time. Learn what they are and how much value they provide to what you are doing. Seek ways to increase productivity.

Strategies for work you hate to do.

Develop effective strategies to deal with work that you hate to do, but must do nonetheless. One approach is to develop time objectives for throughput. Seek enjoyment in finishing dreaded work ahead of schedule. Another approach is to reward yourself. Upon completion of such hated work, reward yourself with a treat.

Improve your writing skills.

Writing is a fundamental business and project management skill. Writing is not a gifted talent for most, rather a learned skill. Writing improves with practice. One technique that is sure to work is to write a little something everyday. Be crisp and concise. Use as few words possible to fully cover the facts at hand. You will be surprised by how quickly you can improve your writing skills with just a little bit of practice.

Avoid the temptation to seek perfection.

Place a priority on getting the job done within the objectives of the project. Rather than pursue perfection at every turn within the project effort, seek to identify process improvements that systematically increase the quality of the product of the project. Project perfection is not scalable, process perfection is.

Conduct effective brainstorming sessions.

Brainstorming can be an effective technique to identify new approaches to old problems. Use brainstorming techniques to facilitate creativity and a balanced contribution by all participants. Typically, brainstorming is indifferent to reporting levels. Seek ways to avoid dominant personalities or higher leveled individuals from inadvertantly stiffling creativity.

Keep your team happy and focused.

Seek ways to keep your team happy and focused. People work better when they enjoy what they are doing and when they stay oni track. Small rewards and recognition can go a long way in establishing a positive project team environment.

Develop a personal relationship with a project management consultant.

Most organizations can benefit greatly by working with a project management consultant. Project management consultants can provide just in time training, resources, and knowledge. Use project management consultants to acquire knowledge and to facilitate achievement of your project management and capability maturity objectives.

Establish a process for portfolio management.

Don't confuse a portfolio management tool with a portfolio management process. Integrate all things useful into the process and provide a clear step by step approach to all internal actions and unique organizations considerations required to effective work with the executive committee. Align, manage, and continuously improve upon your portfolio management process.

Revisit the project selection scorecard.

As part of portfolio management, revisit the initial project selection scorecard. Test assumptions and assessments of the project's rank relative to the project selection criteria. If the updated scorecard is significant different from the initial scorecard, seek to identify the reasons why. Ensure end user clients have the tools they need to accurately assess their project ideas. Seek ways to minimize overestimating as well as underestimating of potential benefits.

Maintain a list of the project inventory.

Whether you are using a portfolio management system or simply tracking the projects manually, maintain a list of all projects clearly showing the project status.

Don't allow a comfort zone.

Continue to push your project team to higher levels of performance and quality. Don't allow team members to fall into a comfort zone or to become complacement with a "that's good enough" mentality. Continue to seek ways to delight your end user customers and exceed their expectations as well as to improve the perceived and real value of the project management team and organization.

Don't manage your manager.

An effective relationship takes two. Seek ways to establish a high performance relationship with your manager. Continually ask for insight and direction as well as seek to understand all of the things within your manager's control that can be done to help you get what you need to meet your objectives. Sincerely ask for feedback, both positive and constructive criticism. Take action to make improvements in noted areas and communicate such efforts with your manager. A manager has several direct reports, but you only have one manager.

Project managers need to be managed too.

Many project managers need managing, most project managers want to be managed and utilized effectively. Challenge your project managers to higher levels of individual performance and greater participation in organizational maturity. Invest in your project managers by giving them the training and tools that they need. Don't allow project managers to become generalists with weak technical skills.

Don't overlook the value of project management soft-skills.

Soft-skills are tremendoudly important in project management. Grow the soft-skills of your organization to improve project results as well as to facilitate the establishment of a professional, high performance culture.

Project Management Training Series: Tip 4 - Get training references from someone other than the project management training vendor.

Every vendor has a unique approach and value add to offer. Even for such things as PMP certification training, there exists significant differences in the course outline and approach from one vendor to the next.. For example, vendors like Cheetah Learning have a tremendously successful training methodology that ensures the attendee can successfully pass the PMP exam in just five days. Likewise, there are other offerings by educational institutions that provide a complete different training experience and offer college credit hours as well. Seek references from someone other than the training vendor to best align your needs to their approaches.

Project Management Training Series: Tip 3 - Ensure that your investment in project management training can be programatically incorporated into your project management process.

In order for your investment in project management training to be fully realized, it must be incorporated into your project management process. Ensure that process owners update their assigned processes with useful and usable training content as well as new skills, tools, and techniques. For example, if a class is held on risk management and useful and usable new techniques are learned, ensure that the risk management processes, step guidance, and templates and tools are all updated so that all participants can benefit, rather than just those able to attend the class.

Project Management Training Series: Tip 2 - Invest in high value project management training offerings.

Establish a roadmap for high value project management training offerings. Align you project management maturity and capability maturity objectives to point vendor training programs. Ensure that the training vendor has direct expertise in the topic and that the vendor stays on your track. Tailor the class agenda to best meet the project management knowledge areas and skill sets that your are of most value to you.

Project Management Training Series: Tip 1 - Cut your training budget in half or by 75%.

Examine your past year's budget for basic project management training. If you don't have one already, implement a project management process solution that can be accessed on demand and used by full time as well as casual project managers. Provide easy to use scalable work flows, step by step guidance, information, help, project management templates, mentors, etc. A well defined project management process can also serve as a training on demand platform. Ensure your organization's command of project management basics as well as cut costs for training that is basic.