Describes global best practices, competencies, and standards of superior project organizations based on research conducted by the Top 500 Project Management Forum. It emphasizes the selection process, performance evaluation, and personnel development to provide the key elements for adjusting and adapting to flexible conditions. The text also highlights enhancements in professional image, job performance, and personal earnings.
Valuable business skills from a leading project management expert To make the leap from average to superior, you must develop the skills to manage each project like a small business. The Business-Savvy Project Manager thoroughly explains key concepts, principles, and tools for project managers to provide organizations with superior return-oninvestment and top performance. From portfolio management and strategic alignment to calculation of economic metrics and effective use of both financial and nonfinancial criteria in project proposals, it gives you the business savvy for top-level performance and certain career success.
Even the most experienced project managers aren’t immune to the more common and destructive reasons for project collapses. Poor time and budget performance, failure to deal with complexity, uncontrolled changes in scope . . . they can catch anyone off guard. Performance-Based Project Management can help radically improve your project’s success rate, despite these and other obstacles that will try to take it down. Readers will discover how they can increase the probability of project success, detailing a step-by-step plan for avoiding surprises, forecasting performance, identifying risk, and taking corrective action to keep a project a success. Project leaders wishing to stand out among their peers who are continually hampered by these unexpected failures will learn how to:• Assess the business capabilities needed for a project• Plan and schedule the work• Determine the resources required to complete on time and on budget• Identify and manage risks to success• Measure performance in units meaningful to decision makersBy connecting mission strategy with project execution, this invaluable resource for project managers in every industry will help bring projects to successful, career-enhancing completion.
""Highlighting the practical side of real-life project execution, this massive reference stresses project management as an independent profession--detailing the varied applications where project management is used and examining the numerous and diverse project management responsibilities and tools.
Imagine having access to the top project managers from organizations and industries around the world. Imagine uncovering what they do, how they approach their challenges, and what they know. Alpha Project Managers: what the top 20% know that everyone else does not gets you inside the minds of these top managers and shares their practices, their attitudes, and their secrets.
No longer restricted to the engineering industry, project management has at long last crossed over to mainstream business. Project Management for Business Professionals is the definitive reference on the essentials of contemporary project management. Featured here are some of the foremost practitioners and researchers from academia, consulting, and private industry, sharing their various areas of project management expertise and providing a wide range of perspectives on everything from risk management to resource planning to ethics management. Focusing on both the technical and human sides of the field, this unique resource follows the main points of the "project management body of knowledge"-the certification standard of the Project Management Institute. The experts address the procedures and processes for planning and managing projects and explore project team/group dynamics, examining the interpersonal relations and the political and organizational considerations that can impact a project.
Managing Projects in the Real World provides clear and actionable advice to project managers for recognizing, anticipating, and overcoming challenges associated with the human component of leading others. The mechanics of project management are rational and straightforward to learn. The art of project management is irrational and complex to learn. Project managers need to develop a repertoire of soft skills that are typically hard for them, since they rose through the ranks to that position by virtue of superior reasoning skills. But if a project manager cannot adjudicate the clash of personalities, finesse the friction between assigned and preferred roles, steer clear of hidden hazards, and diplomatically resolve overlapping assertions of competing authority—that project manager is in a world of trouble. From the human perils of project management, nobody is better qualified to rescue beleaguered project managers than Melanie McBride—veteran PM and author of the Intel blog, The Accidental Profession. She sheds light on those dark, dusty places that fall between the cracks of theory and best practice out in the real world where irate colleagues, unrealistic product launch dates, and virtual meetings reign supreme and run amok. In this book you’ll find targeted discussions and specific techniques to empower you to meet the challenges that project managers face every day. The book is structured into project phases to help any project manager on any kind of project jump right to the tried and true solution for the challenge at hand.
When Advanced Project Management first appeared it quickly acquired a reputation for excellence on both sides of the Atlantic as a book that successfully bridges the gap between introductory texts on project management and specialist works on professional practice. Its aim is twofold: to provide a guide for managers, engineers, accountants and others involved in project work, and a reference for advanced students of project and construction management. This fourth edition of the book has been heavily revised, with substantial material to reflect the changes in project management. The following topics are either new to the book or have been given greater emphasis: ¢ Project definition and appraisal ¢ Procurement and the supply chain ¢ Concurrent engineering ¢ Cost and management accounting ¢ Quality management ¢ More detailed explanations of critical path analysis, now predominantly using the precedence system ¢ Increased treatment of resource scheduling ¢ Planning with multiple calendars ¢ Planning within fixed time constraints, using crashing and fast-tracking methods ¢ Standard networks, modules and templates ¢ Risk management.