Failing to plan is planning to fail. Proper planning prevents poor performance. A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. You’ve heard them all; planning is important. But it is also complex, intensive, and requires a little finesse with a crystal ball. Of projects that experience schedule slippage, 60 percent use no planning tools or methods; another 30 percent used planning methodology but not tools. Who knows what happens to the other 10 percent, but the majority tracked slippage back to lack of proper planning. This is why many PMI methodology tools are designed to aid this crucial step. Let’s take a look at three tools that can help a project start on the right note.

When you are making personal investments, say for your retirement, you need a balanced portfolio. Your mother, and your financial advisor, always told you not to put all your eggs in one basket: you need to diversify, reduce risk, and maximize profitability when possible. If you expand this out, you have a good picture of project portfolio management. Executives need to diversify, spread out risk, and, always, obtain a return on their investment. Just as you would ask, “Is that stock going to help me retire to Tuscany?”; those managing project portfolios would ask, “Is that project going to help us further our business objectives and goals?” How do they make that determination?

As a project recovery consultant, when I go into a new corporate culture, it is like a city dweller being dropped into the middle of the wilderness, or someone from Arizona walking into a NWT winter storm. The same rules that will keep you alive in a survival situation apply: be prepared, evaluate the situation, use your senses, adapt and improvise, and by all means, stay hydrated. Coffee, tea, whatever it takes. The difference is that my goal is not survival, but rather to ensure that I respect and work within the existing corporate culture in order to do my job and provide value to the corporation.

Community organizer and writer Saul Alinsky wrote, “Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.” You’re not living in an abstract world, and you’re definitely not living in a frictionless one. Change is constant; managing that change is a little more inconsistent. Whether an organization is implementing new processes or integrating updated systems, managing change is the crucial factor in success.

In 2009, Alfresco executive Matt Asay said of SharePoint: “It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has caught its competitors napping.” While competition has intensified since, SharePoint remains incredibly popular. Companies like Telus, MillerCoors, Citibank, and (surprise) Microsoft, use SharePoint for training; others, like Procter and Gamble, Kroger, and Dell, use it to create websites to interact with the public; still others use the platform for project management. What benefits does it offer as a PM tool?