A great part of a companies success is its employees. If a company only rewarded teams and not individuals, then all an employee has to do is seek to be in a very strong team. Essentially that employee wouldn’t have…   Read more»

I found that the best way to avoid this tunnel vision is to have thorough planning. Whenever starting a project, it is vital to examine all routes available. It is also important to explore each option individually and pick the…   Read more»

This class taught me a great deal. From the definition of a project, all the way to finalizing a project. I learned about risk assessment, about the project life cycle, about different departments and their roles. What was most intriguing…   Read more»

Establishing good relationships with vendors is critical to your company’s success. Without a strong relationship, you won’t be able to produce as much revenue as hoped for. Here are some tips to maintaining a good relationship with vendors: 1. Explain…   Read more»

I agree with gingeranderson, a company should look at how much time, effort, and cost its going to take to in-source a clinical trial. They then should call a CRO and get a quote from it and compare the two….   Read more»

I would definitely pick an engineering role. This is because, engineering roles are a lot more interactive in terms of hands on projects and technical skills. An engineering role deals with the details and the analysis and everything that actually…   Read more»

Filling a position of an employee that performed critical work for a project can be very challenging. This is especially because he/she is probably an expert in the tasks they perform for the project and know the most about whatever…   Read more»

I believe our company tackles this issue wisely. Each employee has a manager that practices reactive management. But each employee is assigned to a team and each team has a lead. That lead practices preventive management. This combination allows for…   Read more»

I don’t think that using the same supplier but a different coating would satisfy the dual source requirement. Using a different coating might not be as useful and productive because each coating has a different set of properties. These properties…   Read more»

In the monitoring and controlling phase, it is very important to keep track of unexpected growth. That growth can be in terms of monetary value. The project might go through a scope change that would require a larger sum of…   Read more»

A change request at Lockheed Martin works in a very similar manner. First the person submitting the change request must log it on a special program and that program. That program will ask him a series of questions about the…   Read more»

We have a very efficient way of tackling this dilemma. Every two weeks each team sits in a room and looks through the work needed to be performed for the following two weeks. Based on this, we write tasks for…   Read more»

The project manager should look at other vendors in a timely manner and contact them for a quote. He should also look at the all their track records and only contact the ones with a clean record. He could also…   Read more»

To have the deliverables ready in time, as a manager, you need to take certain steps and plan ahead. First you need to be a very organized and communicative manager. You need to set deadlines, communicate with the different teams…   Read more»

I would have to agree that the most important phase is the planning phase. It is what the other phases ride off of. In the planning phase, the project blooms. It is defined. In my company, during the planning phase,…   Read more»

The planning phase in our company is crucial for any project. This is because the projects we take on are government funded projects and any mistake in the planning phase would risk us losing the entire project. This is why…   Read more»

Logging work is beyond important. In my company, we also write a lot of scripts so it’s very helpful to keep documentation on how to use each script. We also have to keep track of certain things we tested and…   Read more»

The first thing that should be done when looking at change requests is the reason behind them. We receive a lot of change requests on projects we work on. Some of these requests are unnecessary because one parameter was overlooked…   Read more»

I had a coworker that worked in the company for 14 years. Since the day I started working, she did nothing the entire time but talk to other coworkers and sit on her phone. She had no communication and wasn’t…   Read more»

Within my company, project managers go through numerous challenges. Some of the main challenges are communication, managing styles and organization. Communication is usually the main problem a project manager runs into. A project manager usually has to communicate across multiple…   Read more»