The articles in this newsletter do not necessarily express or represent the views of the PMI Central Indiana Chapter.

All copyrighted material has been republished with the permission of the author(s).

(c) 2008 PMI Central Indiana Chapter. All rights reserved.

Chapter Events
PMI Central Indiana Chapter

PMI Central Indiana Chapter offers a variety of educational and professional development events relating to the discipline of Project Management.  Our 2-hr Monthly Program Meetings include dinner and a Project Management presentation lasting approximately 1.5 hours.  Our full-day Seminars include breakfast, lunch, and a Project Management training session lasting 6 - 8 hours.  Our Professional Development Day (PDD) and Vendor Fair is a full-day event that includes breakfast, lunch, and several Project Management presentations available in each 1-hr timeslot.

The Newsletter Editor
Ron Lacy, MBA, PMP

This week I had the luxury of being project sponsor as opposed to project manager.  What a strange view for those of us who spend our time in the opposite seat, managing the details of issues, timelines, budgets and matrixed team members who “don’t really report to you”.  The reason I say that it was a luxury is that it gave me the chance to learn some interesting lessons that I think we could apply as project managers.

The BIG Question: Why projects fail in spite of the best PM techniques
Sara Strock

The project management discipline has made huge inroads in the business environment and PMI has over 200,000 members, but we all have heard stories of huge projects that fail, even with good project managers in place.  Often, with lessons learned true lack of good sponsorship can be accountable for most failures.  The role of a sponsor is key in shepherding and negotiating key issues to resolution along with the program manager.

Microsoft Project Best Practices: Critical Path Management
Dr. Edward Hanna

Microsoft Project is a very powerful and very flexible environment.  In that power and flexibility, there is also danger and frustration for the unwary. Project Managers sometimes fall victim to these dangers. They become victims of their own choices--choices concerning the way that they use Microsoft Project. For example, if you are having trouble finding the critical path in your schedule, it is possible that your use of deadlines or constraints may be keeping you from seeing the critical path. Deadlines and constraints in your project schedule can actually create multiple critical paths--to the point that you can't tell which is "the critical path".  In such cases, you have a serious case of "noise" in your schedule network.

Fusion Alliance: What is the Word? - Budget and Control
Kim Seale

PMBOK defines cost budgeting as “allocating the overall cost estimates to individual work activities”.  And the definition of cost control is “controlling changes to the project budget”. Per Wikipedia, budget is defined as “the amount of money that is available for, required for, or assigned to a particular purpose” and control is “mastery or proficiency”.

Global Knowledge: Writing Effective Project Requirements
Global Knowledge

Requirements are (or should be) the foundation for every project. Put most simply, a requirement is a need. This problem, this need, leads to the requirements, and everything else in the project builds off these business requirements.

Risk in Performance: Magic of Managing Uncertainty
Lee Peters

Welcome to another discussion on the Magic of Managing Uncertainty (have I read too much Harry Potter?). We have discussed the challenge of making results and scope certain. It is in performance – the nitty gritty of doing the work to produce that result -- where we truly make risk and scope certain. Creating Certainty in Performance is the most complex and most difficult of all that we do. Actually once we make on task, step, operation, or resource certain, we move on because the project jungle is full of alligators of uncertainty. Rarely do we look back because we are proficient at making things certain – we do watch the meters and gauges that show progress, effort, duration, cost for indications of deviation from our plan. But we ignore normal variation.