Ebook Lessons in Project Management (2e): Part 2 presents the following content: Identify the Critical Path and How This Path Drives the End Date; Change Assumptions to Revise an Estimate; Don’t Forget Face-to-Face Communication on Your Project; Make Quality a Mindset and Ongoing Process; Batch Small Scope Change Requests for Sponsor Approval; Manage Your Vendor Projects Proactively; Look for Risks Inherent to Your Project; Get Sponsor Approval Before Investigating Large Scope Change Requests; Make Sure the Cost of Collecting Metrics Does Not Exceed Their Value; . | CHAPTER 25 Identify the Critical Path and How This Path Drives the End Date The majority of my work involved meeting with people and helping them through one or two particular project problems. I rarely had a chance to meet with someone regularly and help them complete their project from start to finish. That was a big reason why Jerry and I had become very comfortable working with each other. Meeting with him regularly made me feel like a part of the team and allowed me to see not only the T. Mochal et al. Lessons in Project Management Tom Mochal and Jeff Mochal 2011 106 Identify the Critical Path and How This Path Drives the End Date progression of the project but also his professional progression as he learned more and more about being a better project manager. Another person I helped frequently although not as often as Jerry was Ashley Parker. It was the middle of June her team had just completed work on the new marketing information database and she had invited me to attend their project conclusion meeting. The project finished three weeks behind schedule and was over budget by 15 percent not terrible numbers but an interesting discussion ensued as to the cause of these overruns and how they could have been avoided. Ashley began the meet- ing by congratulating the team on a job well done. First off my sincerest thanks to all of you for working so hard on this project. You all did a wonderful job and you should feel proud of your work and our accomplishment. Of course as with any project we did encounter a few problems. That s the purpose for our meeting this morning. Knowing what we know today what could we have done dif- ferently on the project to hit our deadline and budget Chris one of the database administrators spoke up. For the first half of the project everything seemed to go according to schedule. But some of the design decisions we made up front didn t pan out like we hoped and caused us rework delays later on. That s a good point Ashley noted. The .
