Alex Brown's Articles and Speeches

It is time to put project management on the agenda of the board meetings for your organization. Traditionally project management has been a tool for scheduling, planning, and execution. It brings efficiency and predictability to organizations that embrace it. Usually it is adopted by mid-level management to optimize one or two department’s activities. Learn about how the President and CEO of a 400-employee company have made project management their core method to execute their Strategic Plan. Project management is ready for the board room. Learn ways to bring it to the attention of senior managers.

Project management is not yet a profession. One barrier to becoming a profession is the lack of a unique, well-defined body of knowledge. This editorial explores the issue and lists a few knowledge areas, tools, and techniques that could serve as the start of a unique body of knowledge.

To help create consistent, high-quality schedules, organizations may create standards for schedules. These standards help all project managers follow similar principles when creating a new schedule, making them easier to integrate into a portfolio and easier to manage overall. Standards can also help ensure that newer project managers do not repeat common mistakes made by the organization in the past.

This article provides sample standards, and advice on how to customize them to an organization’s practices and needs.

Describes the use of a red-yellow-green status report at a particular company, and some best practices for this popular report format.

Published in early 2006 in the PMI New York City Chapter e-newsletter.

Describes the key decisions of one 400-person company implementing project management across the enterprise, including IT and all insurance business units. Many project management techniques were designed to help the largest organizations and the largest projects. This paper examines which of them work well in smaller organizations.

To be presented at the 2006 PMI College of Scheduling Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida between April 23 and April 26, 2006.

key financial terms, including return on investment, time value of money, payback period, and first-to-market advantage. Applies these financial concepts to sample projects, to help project managers understand the business impact of schedule changes.

Presented at the 2006 PMI College of Scheduling Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida between April 23 and April 26, 2006. Also presented at the PMI North America Congress in Atlanta, Georgia on October 8, 2007.

Organizations may choose to adopt a standard process for approving all projects. Using a template for all proposals can make the approval process easier and provide other benefits to the organization. This article provides a simple template, instructions on filling it out, and a sample completed project charter.

Any organization developing their own standard process to charter new projects can use this template as a starting point and customize it.

Four examples of possible project charters, with an explanation for each showing why it is or is not a charter. The examples are useful teaching examples, designed to challenge people’s ideas of what a project charter is and is not.

The best time to market your project to your organization is at the very start, in the project charter. It is the best chance you have to tie the project into the organizational strategy and to explain its value. Yet the charter is one of the least talked about deliverables in project management.

This material helps you market your projects by preparing a great charter. Learn how simple a good charter can be. Understand how this document can help build executive support and provide documented authorization for your work. Focus on creating a lasting, respectful bond with your senior managers or executive sponsors. It all starts with the charter.

Presented at PMI 2005 North America Congress in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on September 12, 2005. Presented again at a meeting of the PMI New York City Chapter on February 15, 2006.

Addresses the question about whether it is better to model a schedule with only full-time assignments or part-time assignments for resources. Reviews pros and cons of different solutions, and points out critical mistakes schedulers can make when assigning part-time, concurrent work.