Archive for category: Project Management

Using contractors and other vendors can be a great option if you need more people or people with specific skills. However, cost goes beyond the hourly rate you pay. And vendors introduce risks to your project. Here are things to consider before bringing on vendor personnel.

• Examining alternatives, negotiation, contracting, and performance monitoring. Hiring a contractor or vendor takes time. You have to find a person with the right combination of technical and business skills and a personality that fits into the culture of your organization. Then, there’s negotiating the contract and monitoring the vendor’s performance against that contract. Note: Pre-negotiated contracts with vendors make it easier, but you still have to review candidates to find the right person.
• Stakeholders relying too much on vendors. With vendors who have technical and industry experience, business stakeholders might presume that the vendor understands the project requirements in detail. The vendor might use the correct local business vernacular and anticipate the organization’s needs, which lulls stakeholders into feeling they don’t have to participate in the project. They step back and rely on the vendor to represent them. But in most cases, the stakeholders’ requirements and needs of the stakeholder can differ greatly from the vendor’s perception. Be sure to take time and care to verify the stakeholder needs directly, which means conducting in-depth interviews with stakeholders.
• Preventing IP from leaving the building. Vendors are often exposed to and help craft new processes or configure technical tools for the organization. But think about the cost if that intellectual capital walks out the door and is permanently lost. To avoid this, assign in-house personnel to mirror their vendor colleagues. That way, they understand the processes and technical changes a vendor creates for the business and keeps the IP in the house.
• Mitigating risks. Vendor personnel might see confidential information and misuse it or report it to other entities. In addition, vendor personnel can leave at any time to take work for a different client or to change jobs. Of course, in-house personnel can change jobs, too. But you have no control or detailed knowledge of the vendor’s team members and their personnel plans. To avoid these issues, prepare backup staff alternatives and be ready to implement them on a moment’s notice. The costs of mitigating these risks, such as keeping other contract personnel on standby, can be significant. 

Many project managers simply calculate the delta for vendor pay rates against in-house personnel costs. That often underestimates the financial and risk impacts on their organization. Be sure to evaluate all these possibilities in hiring a contractor to produce more accurate project costs and risks.

Have a vendor challenge or success tip for the rest of us? Share in the comments section.

For more about vendor management, check out Oliver Yarbrough’s Project Management Foundations: Procurement course.

Coming Up

My course Project Management Foundations has been updated with several text-based entries in the Table of Contents. You can read up on the hybrid project management lifecycle, get tips on creating a project information system, review a checklist for effective meetings, and more.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 90,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Dear Bonnie,

I’m a project manager and I was sitting in the office common area when my colleagues launched an energetic debate about which was better, product management or project management. I tend to prefer the word different instead of better, but my colleagues wouldn’t budge. Can you give some guidance on this?

Thanks,

Better, Worse, Different, or?

Dear Better, Worse, Different or?

My first few thoughts: 1. Avoid the office common area and take a walk outside even if the tornado warning sirens are going off. 2. Your colleagues should find better topics to argue about. My college dormmates would brainstorm physics for increasing the hours in a day so we could finish our assignments. But I digress.

Sadly, you have stumbled onto the unavoidable office pastime: people loudly debating things they barely understand. In this case, arguing which one is better than the other is like arguing over whether your lungs breathing or your heart beating is better. Try having only one and let me know how that works out.

Product management and project management are two totally different occupations working toward the same goal: making something useful actually happen.

Let me try to break it down into terms your colleagues might grasp.

Product managers are people who sit around and say things like, “You know what the market is missing? An egg yolk and white sold pre-separated in an egg-shaped single-use plastic container for people who can’t take the trauma of cracking an egg.” They study marketplace trends, identify user needs, develop novel ideas, analyze competitors, and build the product lifecycle (how and where it will be built, who will sell it, and how it will be supported once it hits the market.)

Meanwhile, Project managers take that well-being enhancing fever dream with requirements that product management produces and create a plan for bringing the product to fruition (from research, design, development, construction of the manufacturing line, testing, and product validation). They assess risks like the plastic shell breaking when customers try to open the container causing a completely different type of trauma. With plan in hand, they evenly reply to the product managers, “Dope, dude. Here’s the budget, timeline, resources, risk log, and a pilot launch feasible for Q3.”

When the project is done, the project managers turn the product and its manufacturing line over to the product managers, who will work their marketing magic and support the product on an ongoing basis. (At this time, the project manager might get kudos and the opportunity to work on fulfilling the next wild product idea.)

Your instinct to say “different” is spot on. Because anyone with better things to do knows product and project managers are on the same team. Product managers ask, “Should we build this?” Project managers answer, “Here’s how we build this without blowing up the company, or worse, our customers.”

With warm yet different regards,
Bonnie

If you have a burning question, add it to the comments section or send me a message on LinkedIn.

For more about product management, check out Rich Winnie’s Product Management First Steps course. The link for my Project Management Foundations course is below.

Coming Up

A day in the life of a project manager can seem like an endless parade of problems, which can turn almost anyone into a pessimist. Reframing problems into opportunities and a sincere search for solutions can significantly improve performance: yours, your team’s, and your projects’. Join Jason Mackenzie and me for Office Hours on Wednesday, May 7, 2025 at 9am MT, we’ll discuss how positive reframing can improve communication and results at all levels. Click here to join!

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 89,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Dear Bonnie,

I have a problem with delivering on schedule. My technical team eventually gets their job done, but it takes them forever to complete anything. How can I light a fire under them so I can complete my projects more quickly, and more importantly, on time?

Signed, Is it done yet?

Dear Is it done yet,

Ah yes, the elusive on-time tech team—known to inhabit the wilds of your organization like a snuggle of sloths: adorable and clearly not in a rush. (I looked it up. That cute curled up pile of sloths is called a snuggle.)

Let’s start with a revolutionary concept: maybe they aren’t a snuggle but, rather, a scurry of squirrels (yup, checked that one too) doing other stuff. You’re teed off that your project is moving slower than a sloth on a NyQuil drip, while they could be buried by higher priority acorns that someone (probably with more clout and an intimidating glare) told them to finish first. Try asking them nicely what’s going on and, even better, if there’s anything you can do to clear their path. Bribing them with nutty snacks can’t hurt.

Next, remember that tech teams are usually zip-tying the entire infrastructure together while fending off the latest “urgent” request from someone who yells and also thinks their mouse is a dysfunctional laser pointer. If your project is languishing on the “once the network stops crashing” list, you have two options: yell louder than the others (not recommended) or consider hiring a contractor whose job it is to care about your project because you’re paying them to.

And finally, the nuclear option: sponsors. You know, the people who can send a single email, which prompts the team to act like they’re in a Red Bull commercial. If your project has real value (at least in your opinion), get your sponsor involved. Nothing lights a fire under a slothful tech team like a VP breathing down their neck like a caffeinated Komodo dragon. If your team is scurrying, you can earn their everlasting loyalty by coaxing your sponsor to protect your team’s time and sanity like a mama bear warding off unreasonably demanding stakeholders.

Good luck! If all else fails, you can say that the delays are part of your “iterative process.”

Cheers,

Bonnie

I sincerely apologize to any species I’ve offended by omitting them from the metaphors in this article.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 89,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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I took a look at GanttPro, an online project management tool that isn’t covered in my LinkedIn Learning course. It’s a medium-level PM tool at a competitive price. It offers quite a few features without bombarding you with a suite of applications like some other products. While it lacks some things most PMs would want, they have links on their website asking for suggestion. Here’s a quick overview of what it can do.

Note: I spent about a day experimenting, so I might have missed a few things. I found their help videos and knowledge base quite good when I needed them.

• Setup. Getting started is super simple. Create an account and it asks you if you want to create a project. You can start from scratch or use one of their templates (categories like consulting, construction, software development, product launch, web design and more). Use “By methodology” to choose either an agile or waterfall template. And when you click the Create new project button, you’ll see the Gantt chart.
• Create project Gantt charts. It’s called GanttPro, so of course it has a Gantt chart feature. It’s easy to add tasks, subtasks, and milestones. You can indent and outdent to build your task outline. And you can drag tasks around to reorder the list. Or import tasks from an Excel file or Microsoft Project. 
• Create task dependencies. With GanttPro, you can drag from task bar to task bar to create dependencies, or you can add the Predecessor field to the Gantt table to specify them with task IDs. GanttPro supports all four types of dependencies (FS, SS, FF, SF). Clicking a dependency in the chart opens a dialog box for adding lag or lead. When you change task dates, GanttPro recalculates the schedule.
• Add other task info. The Gantt chart table starts with basic fields like task name and assigned resources. GanttPro has other fields like priority, duration, start and end date, budget, actual cost, status and more. Custom fields come in all the usual data types, although they are simplistic and sadly (at least for me) without formulas. If you need to make the same type of changes to multiple tasks, click the Checkmark icon just above the Gantt chart table. GanttPro tracks the history of your past actions so you can undo previous steps. (Click the clock face icon at the very top right of the window. Then, you can select an action to see the project before that action was performed.)
• Manage resources. You can send emails to invite your team to your GanttPro environment. There are also virtual resources to represent roles, skills, materials, costs. You can assign cost rates to resources, a project calendar, or a personal calendar for specific resources. It indicates resource overallocations with a red person icon in the Gantt table as well as in the Workload view.
• Track time. There’s a time tracker for logging time spent on assignments. People can run a timer as they work, or they can enter hours after the fact.

• Display scheduling features. You can save baselines and then display the current schedule compared to the baseline, as shown below. You can also click buttons at the top to display the critical path, show overdue tasks, or expand or collapse the list. Say you have people who want to see status, but you don’t want them to see all the dirty laundry. In GanttPro, a filtered view shows what you want to show your client. Then, you can create a shared private link to that filtered view, so anyone with the link has view-only access to it.
• More views. Like other software, it has Board, List, Calendar, Workload, and Dashboard views. As you navigate through the tool, you’ll sometimes see a “Missing a feature?” link, so you can cast your vote for new functionality.

• View status with reports and a dashboard. There isn’t a lot of reporting: it boils down to filtering tasks with different criteria. When you open the Reports screen and click Reports under development, you can tell GanttPro what types of reports you want. The Dashboard has widgets that you can turn on or off and reorganize, but you can’t create your own.
• Manage budgets and portfolios. With estimates and actual costs, you can track income and expenses in projects. Like other tools, this cost management might not satisfy accounting nerds, but it’s a start. GanttPro doesn’t have any integration with other financial apps either. You can add projects to different portfolios and then review them with a portfolio Gantt chart, List, Workload, and Dashboard view. 

• Communicate with the team. People involved with projects, whether internal or external to your organization, can collaborate by commenting, mentioning people, and attaching files. Click a task to open the side panel and then leave a comment or click Attach files. @mentioning works the usual way. You can also create a link to the task when you want someone to review it.
• Integrate with other software. GanttPro integrates with a few major players, including Slack, OneDrive, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and Jira Cloud. But it’s not the long list of integrations offered by other tools. 
• Help and support.  When you point at icons above the Gantt chart, a popup box describes the feature. Click Learn more to jump into a new browser tab with the GanttPro knowledge base. There are dozens of videos that show you how or you can search the knowledge base for articles.

To sum up, GanttPro could be a good fit for small businesses working on small to medium-sized projects without big demands for customization. It would also be a good Gantt chart add-on if you already have other PM software that doesn’t offer a Gantt chart feature.

If this sounds interesting, here’s info on pricing as of March 2025. The core plan doesn’t offer a lot, so the Advanced plan is a good place to start at $10 per user per month (paid annually). If you need resource management or portfolio management, you’ll want the Business plan ($17 per user per month paid annually). There’s also an Enterprise plan, which I didn’t look at. Their 14-day free trial gives you time to see which level works for you.

For more about other online project management tools, check out my Project Management: Choosing the Right Online Tool course.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 88,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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