Author Archives: Sandy McMillan

About Sandy McMillan

Sandy, who semi-retired in 2011, is the former COO of development and project management businesses operating in the construction and real estate sector throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. He holds university degrees in civil engineering from the Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow, and is a Chartered Engineer, a member of the UK's Institution of Civil Engineers, and a Member of the Association for Project Management. Since graduating, Sandy has more than 35 years management experience with the last 20+ years being in the fields of development and project management. While his early experience was in the heavy civil engineering sector e.g. power stations, he has operated primarily in the building sector since 1988 where he has managed development of retail, office, residential, and industrial properties. When Sandy's not travelling around EMEA on business, he has a home in Warsaw, Poland.

4 Steps to Chairing Effective Meetings

Posted on 5 October 2011 by

I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I’m in a cabinet meeting. – Ronald Reagan (1911 – 2004). There can be few readers who have not experienced lengthy, time wasting … Continue reading →

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Effective Risk Management in 5 Steps

Posted on 14 September 2011 by

Risk is inherent in all our projects (and, in fact all we do).  Risks are often considered in an informal way by the project manager when planning and devising project strategies, but a more disciplined approach to risk management minimises … Continue reading →

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Improve your Peformance by Measuring Successes and Failures

Posted on 7 September 2011 by

Previous posts on Project Management Insight have looked at project ‘failures’ and learning from mistakes. This post considers the use of performance measurement to establish where projects and programmes lie on the continuum between failure and success and the application … Continue reading →

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‘Black Swans’ sink Projects!

Posted on 31 August 2011 by

Recent research published in the Harvard Business Review Magazine asserts that ‘black swans’ – low probability high impact events – are sinking many projects, particularly in the IT sector. The research considered 1,471 large-scale IT projects and suggests that they … Continue reading →

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Learn from Project ‘Failures’ – Part 2

Posted on 24 August 2011 by

Part 1 of this post considered definitions of project ‘failure’ and looked at where two case study projects failed. In Part 2, the causes of failure on our two case studies are outlined and compared with published common causes of … Continue reading →

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