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Gantt charts are great way to illustrate and share project schedules. A well designed Gantt chart is still the best way to show the dependencies between the tasks and deliverables that make up your project.

A good Gantt chart should also make sense to the wider team - it should give everyone an overview of the project and the sequence of tasks and deliverables that need to happen before the project is complete.

Project Managers often produce a Project Initiation Document (PID) at the start of the project. It’s a sort of project reference document, a collection of other bits of important documentation and the starting point for anyone who wants to know what the project is about.

The PID should be useful - something that people want to read - but it can end up being too long and difficult to read. They get produced for the wrong reason - to tick a quality management box rather than to share important project information with key stakeholders. "Project Managers often produce a Project Initiation Document (PID) at the start of the project."

Here are some tips for anyone who’s about to plan a new project. They are for novice project manager but hopefully any project manager will find something useful here.

• Be clear about the deliverable. What exactly gets delivered at the end of the project? You may think it’s obvious but it’s not always the case, particularly in complex projects that have multiple stakeholders. Your project is at risk if your important stakeholders don’t have a shared understanding of what the project is about.

• Read up on Work Breakdown Structures and then use one to break up a complex project into simpler deliverables. Take each task and breakdown into its constituent parts. Keep going until you’ve got a more manageable set of tasks. You end up with something that looks a bit like an organisation hierarchy chart and you’ve now got something to transfer to a plan.

Technology companies understand project management - they organise themselves around projects. They have teams - resources - all working together to deliver a new feature or product on time and on budget.

Software companies also use project managers when they roll out new software for clients. The client’s day to day point of contact with the supplier will usually be one of the supplier’s project managers.

Software development costs are almost entirely people and on a fixed price project it can be hard to unpick every small job and sensibly estimate how long they will take.

Even small projects - one or two months of effort - can have plenty of hidden costs.

Progress 8 is a new way of measuring secondary school performance in England. It was introduced in 2016 and it aims to capture the progress a student makes between the end of primary school and the end of secondary school.

Progress 8 scores are calculated for each individual student and then averaged across the the school to get a single Progress 8 score for the school.

Companies that want to begin to use e-learning for staff training face a bewildering array of jargon, different systems and new technology - the path to a great solution that delivers both high quality training and a clear return on your investment may not be obvious.

Here are some tips to help you find your way:

Here are 5 things to think about if you’re a training company and you want make money by selling online courses.

• Think about the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. You want a ‘multi-tenant’ online system - one system that supports multiple clients or ‘tenants’. A separate ‘instance’ of an online system for each client will cost more in the long run and be more harder to maintain.

• Do you want the client to be as self sufficient as possible? So a client signs up, creates an account, creates their own courses and enrol their own learners. You’re as hands off as possible.