One Page Project Manager

One of the most useful project management tools came my way by recommendation of a colleague. He read the book “The One Page Project Manager” (OPPM) and was quite excited about it. Once I read it I could not wait to get my hands on the actual spreadsheet to begin a test utilization of it with my current project. In both government and corporate organizations, a great deal of time is spent making lengthy Power Point briefs just to give the executive management a snap shot of what is going on internally to your project. The OPPM is simple yet contains a vast amount of information regarding the overall project. In one sheet, that can easily be transferred to one slide, the project manager can explain personnel, tasking, funding, priorities, risks, milestones, schedule and status of each task. It is customizable, although it has been so well thought out, that many changes are not required.

I showed this to one Project Manager at my office and he immediately implemented it. He created an overall OPPM to manage the project as a whole, but he also required the Working Integrated Process Team (WIPT) leads to implement separate OPPM’s for each WIPT, such as hardware, software, required documentation, risks, Information Assurance, etc. Each week during the weekly meeting, the WIPT leads briefed straight from their OPPM slides. It seemed obvious that this team as a whole had a much better working relationship and less communication issues. The head project manager would then update his overall OPPM based on the sub-OPPMs and then use the overall OPPM to brief executive leadership. They did not spend hours updating power point slides, everyone had the information they needed, and the meetings ran very efficiently.

The forms can be downloaded at the following URL in .pdf format for free:

Works Cited

Campbell, Clark A. The One Page Project Manager. New Jersey:
Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2007. Print.