Killer Project Management Diagrams

There are all sorts of complicated project management diagrams out there for you to slap on to your PowerPoint presentation, pass around at a project planning meeting, or present to your boss or production manager as your brilliant idea of how the project is going to run.

Let me clue you in on something: nobody cares. What matters to your boss is that you know within 20% accuracy (not exceeding budget) how much money you'll need to complete your project and when you'll have it completed by. Your resources will take one good look at your diagrams, turn it upside down, move it closer to their eyes, pull it away from their eyes, throw up all over it, drop it, stomp on it, and pray they never have to look at it again.

Your team just needs to know what you expect of them (based on what they told you they needed during the project scoping/estimating phase), when you expect it by, who their backup is, and then they just want to be left alone to do their job.

So if you absolutely must use a diagram, here are a few cool ones I found that don't make me want to quit my job and become a gardener from some rich old people on the East Coast. Enjoy!

Image Source: http://www.waterstons.com/Service/Project+Management/

Image Source: http://themindproject.com/tag/funny/

Image Source: http://www.mpmm.com/project-management-methodology.php

Image Source: http://popular.softlandmark.com/Project_Life_Cycle_Chart_Software.html

Image Source: http://www.stafftechs.com/Guest/Services/StaffTechs/Project_Management.aspx

Happy is probably the diagram that your team will like the most. The others are really for your eyes and the resource managers on your team. Got a diagram you want me to add? Send me the link in the comments below and (assuming it's appropriate) I'll add your killer project management diagram to my list above.

See you real soon!

Project Life Cycle or Project Death Cycle?

There are thousands of ways to manage projects, both online and offline. We're not really interested in returning to the 80's, so in our new blog, Project Management Made Easy, we're going to be focusing specifically around the topic of online project management, including tools, software, apps, resource management, time management, budging and more.

If you're into saving money by planning your projects as efficiently (and easily) as possible, this is the blog you're going to want to subscribe to. However, if you like quoting 5 hours and working 15, losing money by not learning the word contingency, and are pretty much happy being a walking project management disaster, you're in the wrong place and should navigate back over to YouTube and zone out like you were before you started reading our first post.

What the heck is project management anyway? Reverse some words and you have "managing your projects", and our goal is to this in a way that mitigates cost and improves with each iteration of use. There's no magic conveyor belt to your individual project on unfortunately, but with luck our little blog here can give you a fairly decent foundation or template you can build off of.

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