Project managers often face tough times when they need to pull the strings that may make others uncomfortable. Those mainly include conducting project reviews for balancing the triple constraints, facilitating the reviews of the deliverables for quality or compliance, and providing constructive criticism to the team members for corrective or preventive actions.

Everyone likes to hear or deliver good news, however good project managers are expected to be the experts at relaying when things don’t go as planned, typically coupled with a pro-active solution.

The following are the most successful approaches good project managers often practice.

People in the business community often question the value of professional certifications. Is the cost of passing an exam worth it? Some people say yes. Some people say no. Some people qualify their position by suggesting a certification is only worthwhile if an individual lacks sufficient experience in his or her field.

As someone who owns a couple of certifications, I admit my bias toward seeing value in achieving them. With that bias in mind, allow me to explain my rationale for the value of professional certifications. I purposely use the general term “professional certifications” to include certifications for technologies, methodologies and the like because I suspect my rationale applies equally to all.

This is a repost of the attached article first published in the PMI Virtual Library.

In the consulting world, project estimation is a critical component required for the delivery of a successful project.  If you estimate correctly, you will deliver a project on time and within budget; get it wrong and you could end up over budget, with an unhappy client and a burned out team.  Project estimation for business intelligence and data integration projects is especially difficult, given the number of stakeholders involved across the organization as well as the unknowns of data complexity and quality.  Add to this mix a firm fixed price RFP (request for proposal) response for a client your organization has not done work for and you have the perfect climate for a poor estimate.  In this article, I share my thoughts about the best way to approach a project estimate for an extract, transform load (ETL) project.