9780814416150

Summary

It's a jungle out there and project managers are fighting to survive...With countless man-hours clocked and billions of dollars spent every year on project tools, the success rate for projects remains astonishingly low. So what's the solution? Introducing TACTILE Management, a people-centric system that works in conjunction with an organization's existing processes. Based on the seven character is tics of high-performance project teams - transparency, accountability, communication, trust, integrity, leadership, and execution - the book shows project managers how to: * Take project teams out of their functional silos and transform them into a powerful, integrated force* Balance the expectations of customers, management, and project teams with the technical requirements of cost, schedule, and performance* Apply practical phase-by-phase project guidance to real-life situations* Avoid or minimize possible pitfalls* And more Every successful project involves someone in the trenches who has the people skills to match process with the capability of his team and organization. This innovative book shows readers how to make the most of their people...and ensure project success.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Project Management Jungle
Welcome to the Project Management Jungle
Escape Is Possible from the Project Management Jungle
What Creates the Project Management Jungle?
TACTILE Management™ Defined
Succeeding in the Project Management Jungle
The Foundation of TACTILE Management
The Seven Characteristics of Successful Projects
Transparency
Accountability
Communication
Trust
Integrity
Leadership That Drives Needed Change
Execution Results
Mastering the Expectations of Key Stakeholders
Expectations Management
High-Level Stakeholder Expectations
Case Study: The R.101 Project
Traditional Project Constraints with Stakeholder Expectations
Triple Expectations Pyramid
Putting It All Together
The Triple Expectations Pyramid and Your Customer
Customer Expectations: Scope
Customer Expectations: Cost
Customer Expectations: Schedule
The Triple Expectations Pyramid and Your Management
Two Toxic Management Styles
Your Management's Expectations: Scope
Your Management's Expectations: Schedule
Your Management's Expectations: Cost
The Triple Expectations Pyramid and Your Team
Your Team's Expectations: Scope
Your Team's Expectations: Schedule
Your Team's Expectations: Cost
Using the Triple Expectations Pyramid
Avoiding Pitfalls in the Five KeyAreas of a Project
Initiating
PM Assignment
Project Charter
Project Scope
Preplanning the Plan
Avoiding Toxic Management in Initiation
Case Study: The Path Less Taken
Planning
Creating the Initial (Baseline) Plan
Historical Planning Approaches
TACTILE Planning Approach
Project Management Plan Basics: Scope, Time, Cost, and Risk
Management
Finishing the Plan: Quality Assurance, Human Resources
Communication, Procurement, and Integration Management
Discovering and Addressing Needed Information Until Approval
Flexibly Looking Ahead
Avoiding Toxic Management in Planning
Case Study: The Path Less Taken
Executing
Executing to the Plan
TACTILE Execution Approach
Meetings
Controlling Change Control
Selling New Baselines
Learning How to Win
Case Study: The Path Less Taken
Monitoring, Controlling, and Reporting
Monitoring (Don't Even Try To) Control
Reporting
Case Study: The Path Less Taken
Closing
Properly Close All Project Activities
Capture Data for Organizational Learning
Ensure Personal Growth
Case Study: The Path Less Taken
PartV: LivingWell in the Project Management Jungle
"From Chaos comes Creativity, from Order Comes Profit"
Bibliography
Index
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

<html><head></head><body>Chapter 1 Welcome to the Project Management Jungle IT IS 1:15 A.M., a Tuesday night like any other. A lone light burns inside a beautiful Tudor-style custom home on the edge of the Northwest Hills in Austin, Texas. Inside, yet another busy project manager struggles to complete his work for the day, entangled within the project management jungle. In this unrelenting, always-on, pressure- cooker environment, he juggles hundreds of e-mails per day, endless meetings that accomplish little, stakeholders with impossible expectations, and new problems that should have been foreseen before they consumed additional money, resources, and attention. His two remaining tasks for the night are to finish up preparations for his monthly ops review with management, scheduled for the next morning, and to generate an approach on how to get his design and test functional teams to work better together. The two teams have been fighting with each other for weeks and are doing little real work to solve their issues. That meeting is tomorrow, as well, “sometime after 5:00 P.M.” Down the hall, his two gorgeous children, five and three years old, slumber away. He guiltily resolves, yet again, to take them to the park on Saturday. Or perhaps it will have to be Sunday. He did at least spend a few minutes with them earlier that evening, tossing a small basketball, before they went off to bed and he off to his Mac. His wife, hoping to spend some time with him watching a DVD together, chatting about the kids, or talking about the possibility of a vacation, has given up and gone to bed. He sends several e-mails and then, cursing to himself, realizes that he has misplaced a key notebook. Quietly, he slips into the master bedroom to check a stack beside the bed. He glances fondly down at his dozing wife as he finds the notebook and sighs as he leaves the room. He wishes there were another way to easily lead his large project group in the complex task at hand. So many issues, he muses. Got to make it happen, though. Winners do what is necessary to win. With one last look at his wife, he thinks firmly, There will be time for catching up on all this when the project is over. His cell phone rings from the study. Frustrated that he cannot finish his current tasks, he hurries to answer. It is his Asian customer, full of questions about the latest status report. Wearily, he tries to explain. He can tell his customer is not very happy with the answers. Forty-five minutes later—not really done yet—he stops for the day, noting e-mail traffic coming in from all over the world, including places where it is even later at night. Exhausted, he falls into bed, trying not to make too much commotion. He rolls over and almost immediately drops into sleep. The alarm will go off in four short hours, and he will do it all over again. Sound familiar? Welcome to the project management jungle! Escape Is Possible from the Project Management Jungle You may think that immense stress and a large time investment are the price of success as a project leader. But there is another way. In the past few years, I have led multiple teams in several companies to success without working excessive hours and while experiencing much less stress than our friend here. This book will help you do the same on your projects without going to lengthy weeklong training classes or spending massive dollars on a new process. Sadly, success in the project management jungle is too often not the end result of all the effort involved. Enter “project success rate” into a Web search engine and the results are disturbing, with many studies quoting success rates of only 30 to 50 percent. Of course, the majority of studies look at myriad teams in a variety of industries and applications, and each study has its own definition of success, making it hard to find a baseline for a clear picture. Succeeding in the Project Management Jungle is aimed primarily at active project managers who work with knowledge worker teams. The term knowledge worker, of course, covers a lot of territory. After all, virtually everyone in today’s workplace works with some sort of data. We will focus on knowledge worker teams employed in information technology (IT), software, hardware, systems design, and other engineering or technically related applications. These professionals struggle in the project management jungle every day. Read on to learn about five key factors that create this jungle environment. Then keep reading, and by the end of this book you will have learned how to thrive there. </body></html>

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Succeeding in the Project Management Jungle

0814416152

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Summary

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Excerpts

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