The vacation season is nearly over and the recovery effect vanishes into thin air when project team members have a first look at their e-mail inboxes after returning. It’s not unusual that hundreds of mails pile up there. No question – project communication is essential for project success - but what can you do not to drown in the flood of e-mails?

Here are 10 tips to use e-mails in your project communication as efficiently as possible:  

One of the biggest challenges in project management is estimating project effort. Many project managers run into problems, because they have underestimated the time, resources and budget they need to complete the project successfully.

A few weeks ago, we asked for your opinion on the InLoox products in the InLoox Customer Survey 2013 and these are the results:

Part 2: Completing projects in time

^{Adapted from: www.Speed4Projects.Net}

^{Author: Wolfram Müller, Speed4Projects; license agreement: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/legalcode}

Last week’s post was about the phenomenon that even though there are generous buffer times, projects often are not completed in time. Most project teams are familiar with the procedure: After a relaxed initial phase, projects become very stressful for all team members. Actual times hardly ever stay below the estimated values.

But how can you avoid this problem?

Part 1: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow…

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion“, says Parkinson's law (C. Northcote Parkinson, 1955).

Everyone knows cases in which this doctrine applies to project management. At the beginning of a project, there is plenty of buffer time for all the project stages, so that the project team doesn’t fall behind and is able to deliver results to the customer in time. Towards the end of the project, things tend to get really stressful and meeting the project objectives is jeopardized. There are loads of projects which are finished far behind schedule.

Architects, corporate consultants or the field sales force are no longer the only ones to work on projects from changing locations. Mobility has become an important factor in all kinds of industries. Team members shuttle between projects and company sites and are part of distributed project teams.

While they are away on business, permanent callbacks at the office or the exchange of information via e-mail are cumbersome and error-prone. So, mobile team members often miss out on the change of a deadline or a contact person or on a new work package.

These are the team members we have developed our InLoox Mobile Apps for, which are now available for download.

The second part to our mini series on the Gantt chart (click here for part 1) deals with the advantages and the disadvantages of bar charts and clever ways to use them.

You get more than 2.2 million results by entering “Gantt chart“ in Google. The bar chart that is widely used in project management has been pronounced dead ever so often, but still seems to be highly relevant.

You get more than 2.2 million results by entering “Gantt chart“ in Google. The bar chart that is widely used in project management has been pronounced dead ever so often, but still seems to be highly relevant.

For everyone who wants to equip large project teams or entire companies with InLoox PM, there is now a new type of license: The InLoox PM Corporate License. With this, you can provide all project team members in your company with InLoox PM.

^{Source: http://projektmanagement-definitionen.de/glossar/kritischer-pfad/}

The critical path is one of the classic instruments in project management and an excellent tool for project time planning. However, project management students and even experienced project managers often have difficulties explaining what the critical path really is. Our 5 questions on the critical path will help you to gain a better understanding: