This book is about successfully managing real projects. I don’t mean those nice, neat projects where you can hand pick the team members, where you never have problems with management and where everything goes right. Personally I’ve never seen one of those but I’ve seen far too many project management books that assume the odds are stacked in your favour. This book doesn’t!It deals with what to do when you start or inherit projects where resources are scarce, time is short and things may already be going wrong. It takes a pragmatic but highly effective approach on how to succeed in the toughest project situations. It may save your job or even make your whole career!
Imagine this scenario. You have been asked to takeover your company’s most important project. Senior management is very upbeat about everything and appear confident in your ability to bring the project in on time and budget. There’s a lot riding on your shoulders.
On digging into the project, you find that the main deliverables to date appear to be two inch thick piles of project plans and you can’t find anyone who really appears to know what is happening. You start to get that uneasy feeling that maybe the printer is spewing resumes and you have actually taken on a nightmare of a project. This book is for you and for those about to take on a tough new project.
“Full of techniques that can be applied straight away and memorable anecdotes to illustrate key points, this is a very practical guide to successfully delivering projects in the real world.”
Richard Wilson, Head of Optimise Products, Cable & Wireless
The book is divided into five sections that take you from diagnosing the state of an existing project through to creating a realistic new project plan and then maintaining it during the life of the project
This will help you learn about projects, why they can go so badly wrong and what to look out for in real life.
This section shows you how to quickly diagnose problems in an existing project that you’ve taken over – or that you need to assess. It explains how to get beneath the surface of the project and get to the true situation fast.
This section shows you how to start a new project from scratch or re-build a troubled existing project. At the end of Part C you will have an initial version of the plan that you can then go on to optimize in Part D.
This part will help you create a realistic and optimized plan that you can then use to manage the project.
Having produced a realistic project plan at the start of the project, this section explains how to manage the project team to ensure you have the right information to make decisions and update the plan to reflect the changing situation over time. It will help you highlight issues early and resolve them before they become crises.
About the Author
“What’s useful about this book is that it assumes that most projects have already gone wrong before they’re off the ground and that resources and times are not just limited, but inadequate – welcome to real world project management.”
“There’s no shortage of guides to surviving in the business jungle, but this one knows where the watering holes are.”
“A valuable tool that can help project managers at any stage in a project..this one belongs on the bookshelf.”