project-central.co.uk

Here is the link to download the free Project Management Guidebook

 http://www.project-central.co.uk/download.php

One of the key strengths a project manager brings to an organisation is a consistent approach based on best practice and efficiency.

Communication is a vital skill to avoid misunderstanding and to clarify actions and roles. Many project managers spend time writing project documentation from scratch but then find their documents need to be modified for the next project.

 There are some really low-cost project templates in the market that do not make it cost effective to write your own. Take for example a risk register. This is usually created as an Excel spreadsheet - 30 minutes maximum to write? But as we need colleagues to complete or understand it in a consistent way we then have to write a document explaining how to use it. 2 hours of effort? Then over time we have to maintain it as it is adapted for new situations that we hadn’t envisaged.

The fully-loaded cost of a project manager is probably £60 per hour. So writing a simple document such as a risk register could cost £120+

For around £200 you can buy a complete set of documentation covering the whole project lifecycle. These can be easily tailored to your company as they are in Microsoft Word, Excel or Project.

A professional set of 52 templates I have been using for over a year which I can recommend is from Method 123 and were developed for small to large scale projects.

Each document has a well-structured Table of Contents, which clearly defines each section. Each section has detailed instructions describing how to quickly and efficiently complete it. Finally, each section includes relevant tables, graphs and charts which are tailored to your project.

Using commercial templates gives you a cost-effective way to focus on your PM tasks and communicate and manage your project professionally - the economics don’t stack up for home grown documents.

Graham Perry

Circulating MS Project plans and updates to various stakeholders can be very time consuming as many people don’t have Project installed and you either have to print your plan out or do a bit of creative cutting and pasting into a word document before emailing.

Here’s a time-saving idea that I have been using for a while which exports your plan as a PDF document - readable by anyone who has Adobe Reader. It is easily emailed and, what’s more, it is free!

PrimoPDF is a free conversion tool that converts any document that can be printed into PDF format. Download it for free from here. It doesn’t introduce any popups onto your system and has never caused any problems in the 2 years I’ve been using it.

Once installed you can create a PDF file from your MS Project document by clicking File - Print  and when the printer window comes up, select the pull down arrow on the printer select field and select “Primo PDF” from the list and click OK.

A window will then pop up - pick the location you want to save it to and name your file (leave the resolution setting to Screen) and click OK.

When the document has been created Primo will preview it on your screen. You are then free to email it

Graham Perry