International Roundup, Vol 18, No 4

Systematic planning and evaluating the project management effort

Morten Fangel
Chief Consultant
fangel Consultants
morten@fangel.dk

Presented at the NORDNET 2005 Symposium on Project Management, Copenhagen, Denmark, 27 October 2005

Introduction

When managing projects the focus is on how to perform project management activities as well as project execution activities. The planning and evaluating of the project management effort itself is primarily done intuitively based on years of experience - or by following predetermined guidelines for project management.

However, a more conscious and systematic planning and evaluating of the management effort is needed for several reasons, which are listed in the paper. Further, the paper presents a methodology of which the three main steps are:

• Exploring the project situation and characteristics as well as the project management challenges and potential initiatives.
• Extracting master and detail plans for the project management effort.
• Evaluating the performed project management activities including documenting eachactivities in a logbook.

Later, we transfer our experiences from implementing the concept in practice - and in inhouse project management guidelines as well in the baseline for assessing project management competences.

The methodology has been developed and refined over the last ten years - based on our research, consultancy, and practising of project management (Fangel 1989) (Fangel 2000).

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