Some queries have come through relating to project management tools and principles, which has prompted me to start sharing Project Management tips. The intention is to simply share experience and hard lessons learnt. Hopefully they’ll prompt some thoughts that will at the very least spark a thought on how to improve your project at this early stage, or prompt you to research some project management principles and processes on your own.

The tips for today:

Question … What problem are you addressing?

This essentially refers to mission statements or project objectives. Often when teams get together to solve a problem, there seems to be agreement of what the problem is, however people’s interpretation of problems, and what they should do to solve a problem is seldom identical.

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The winners have been announced for the 2009 competition, and after completion of exams, they’ll be packing their bags for an all expenses paid trip to the SEW Eurodrive and Festo head offices in Germany. While reviewing and reflecting on the six entries, two things that I kept on thinking about was the difference in quality of project proposals and the amount of work done by the six different universities, and whether university lecturers have actually bought into the benefits and opportunities of the PneuDrive Challenge.

Students from the university of Stellenbosch have won this competition two years in a row, and when you compare each of those projects with other entries, you’ll notice that the difference in the amount of thought and work that needs to go into a winning entry is of quite a high standard. I wouldn’t recommend getting caught up in producing massive amounts of content, because that is not exactly what the judges are looking for, but the standard of work is high and a project needs to present...

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