Projects dominate our headlines.
A pandemic, economic upheaval, and an environmental crisis demand innovative thinking, courageous leadership, and globally orchestrated action. Technological innovation is a relentless engine of growth and destruction.
The need to respond to a global pandemic has forced organizations large and small to react quickly, learn rapidly, and make critical decisions based on shifting circumstances. Every response is a project.
Innovation in energy production has changed assumptions about how cars, buildings, and factories are powered. Installing solar panels and windmills, scientific research, closing out‐of‐date power plants, and launching electric car companies are all projects.
Projects dominate our workplace.
Our project‐driven workforce repairs freeways, releases social media apps, makes films, remodels our houses, and searches for medicines and therapies to protect and heal us. Businesses shift supply chains. Nonprofits open below‐market rental housing to ease economic pressures on working families. We are constantly transforming our global civilization in tiny increments. One project at a time.
Innovation, more than ever before, is a must‐have capability for every organization. We do not all need to be inventors, scientists, and software developers to innovate. Throughout this book, innovation means bringing a fresh solution to a problem that matters to people. Innovation is always built on projects.
Project management provides critical thinking and communication tools to navigate the ever‐increasing avalanche of change that surrounds us.
Project management is not new. The pyramids and aqueducts of antiquity certainly required the coordination and planning skills of a project manager. While supervising the building of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, Michelangelo experienced all the torments of a modern‐day project manager: incomplete specifications, insufficient labor, unsure funding, and a powerful customer. Michelangelo was the exception in his day. Now, 500 years later, the challenge of leading projects affects every level of every organization.
To understand how deeply our workplace benefits from project management, we must first understand projects. Projects are all the work we do one time. Whether it's designing an aircraft, building a bakery display case, or creating a business logo, every project produces an outcome and every project has a beginning and an end. Fundamental to understanding the importance of projects is realizing that each one produces something unique. Designing and tooling up to build a new electric car is a project (actually a lot of projects), but manufacturing thousands of electric cars is not. Manufacturing and other repetitive processes are defined as ongoing operations.
The challenge of managing operations is to become highly proficient at known tasks. The challenge of managing projects is to lead a disparate group of people to make good decisions, over and over, as they make something new. That's why project management is really a set of critical thinking and communication tools. These tools help us with a range of leadership duties:
Project management, when done well, is a triumph of human cooperation and critical thinking. The tools of project management help people make rational decisions based on objective information. Of course, it is commonplace for experts with good intentions to disagree. That only makes project management all the more valuable and increases the importance of sound decision‐making techniques.
In a world filled with challenges and opportunities, the project management toolset helps us navigate uncertainty and turn dreams into realities.
Project management is a discipline—a set of methods, theories, and techniques that have evolved to manage the complexities of work that is unique and temporary. Even as the discipline continues to evolve, it can claim a proven track record. Millions of projects around the globe routinely rely on the concepts found in this and other project management books. The Project Management Institute (PMI), headquartered in the United States; the International Project Management Association (IPMA), serving Europe, Asia, and Africa; and other standards organizations have formalized this discipline over the past 60 years.
The proliferation of projects has led to substantial growth in the number of people who call themselves project managers, and project manager is now a common role in nearly every kind of organization. The related phenomenon is the rise of the certified project manager. PMI and IPMA both offer professional certification programs to formally recognize skills, knowledge, or both.
Examples of how project management is spreading to new parts of our global workplace can be found in the profiles at the end of this chapter on two organizations, OrthoSpot and PM4NGOs. The first is a business startup, and the second is a nonprofit that is promoting the use of project management in developing countries by aid agencies. In both cases, these organizations have used the proven project management framework as a starting point, and then adjusted it to meet the needs of their unique audience.
Given the importance of thriving in a project‐driven world, the people who lead projects—who turn visions of what might be into tangible products and services—stand out. But it has been proven that project managers alone can't carry the burden of creating mature organizations whose project management capability produces a strategic advantage. In fact, as the pace of change continues to increase, leaders at every level must be able to speak the language of project management.
A related trend is the growth of part‐time project leaders. These tend to be senior staff and functional managers tasked with leading smaller or part‐time projects. They don't want the project manager title or career path. But they still need to clarify goals, make practical plans, and communicate regularly. These people view project management as one more set of tools that make them effective leaders.
How does project management fit into your personal career goals? In an economy that is pushing each of us to learn and adapt, how much change do you expect in your job over the next decade? If the new normal is continuous transformation, isn't the ability to navigate new territory the most enduring skill?
Twenty‐five years ago, the project management community could agree that a successful project was on time, on budget, and delivered to specification. But times change. Too many projects have “delivered to specification” without actually being valuable to the organization that paid for them. The most common offenders have been expensive information technology (IT) projects that produced reports or systems that didn't make a positive difference to the business, either because the system was rejected by the users or it didn't solve the real problem driving the project. But IT isn't alone. Any project team that focuses only on delivering the specified product or service but loses sight of the context of the project can be guilty of failing to deliver value.
A more current definition of a successful project is one that delivers business value. The implication is that the project manager should understand the business case—why was this project approved? It has also broadened the perception of who is a project stakeholder. After all, if a solution to my part of the organization causes pain to your part of the organization, have we made things better or worse?
Another aspect of delivering value is the realization that if our solutions are not really accepted and used, they probably aren't achieving their potential impact. Therefore, the practice of change management has a growing role on project teams. As the term is used here, change management refers to assisting affected people to change their behaviors in support of the project goal. This should not be confused with change control, which addresses controlling changes to scope, schedule, budget, and other previous agreements.
When project managers see their job as leading change that delivers business value, they see the bigger picture and increase their contribution to their employer and to all stakeholders.
Project management has been called both an art and a science. In these pages, you will see how mastering the science of project management provides a foundation for the art of leadership. The necessary skills are common to both. There is no question that the best project managers are also outstanding leaders. They have vision, they motivate, they bring people together, and, most of all, they accomplish great things.
Indeed, when we characterize the attributes of the great project managers, their skill can seem mysterious and magical, as though the good ones are born and not made. Fortunately, that is not the case. Through over 30 years of listening to many thousands of professionals and observing the most successful project leaders, it has become very clear to me that project management is a skill that can be taught and learned. I've learned that, far from being magical or mysterious, certain characteristics are consistently found on successful projects in every industry. Boiled down, they consist of these five project success factors that drive the design of this book:
Far from being mysterious, these five essential factors can be achieved through the diligent, persistent use of the science of project management. That is not to say that success comes without art—on the contrary, art is immensely important. Art encompasses political and interpersonal skills, making creative decisions when complete information is lacking, knowing intuitively when to delegate work, and more. But learning the basic science is requisite to practicing this art.
That's important for all of us, because it means that success at leading projects is not reserved for the lucky few born with the skills; rather, it is a discipline that can be taught and learned.
Project management can be viewed as a science composed of techniques and methods, and even software. It can also be viewed as the ability to inspire a team to achievement, to make tough choices, and to act with integrity when mistakes are made. In fact, project management can be all of these things. To grow, we must recognize the difference between knowing the science and practicing the art.
The art of project leadership embodies skills that are gained through experience, sensitivity, and a thorough knowledge of the basic science of management. Learning the basics of project management can be your first step on the road to becoming a skilled and inspiring leader. While developing all these skills will take time, the basic science can be learned fairly quickly; able students can read and practice the lessons in this book on their very next project.
This book is written for people who need to understand the time‐tested techniques of project management and how those methods are being put to use on projects every day. It is for people who need a complete foundation in the discipline, whether they are recent graduates, experienced executives, mid‐level managers, or team members wanting to be team leaders. This book is primarily about how: how to get agreement on goals and how to reach them, how to enlist team members and project sponsors, how to negotiate schedules and budgets, and how to reduce risk and increase the odds of success.
The five project success factors introduced earlier in this chapter drive the content in this book. As the workplace has become more project‐driven, other factors that influence projects also need to be addressed. The following checklist expands on the five factors and shows you where to look in this book for practical advice.
This checklist is available as a downloadable form at www.VersatileCompany.com/FastForwardPM.
In addition to practical advice applying proven techniques, this book has several features that make it easier to apply this advice:
Books are one medium for learning. Live, interactive webinars with the author and his team provide another medium to stay up to date on new trends or explore a new twist on topics within the book. Be notified of free webinars by registering for updates at www.VersatileCompany.com/FastForwardPM.
The distance from concept to application can be shortened for all of us by using standard forms and templates. This book contains more than 20 checklists, forms, and templates for managing your own projects. We've titled these forms the Fast Foundation in Project Management, because together they form a basic project management methodology. The forms are listed in Appendix B and can be downloaded from www.VersatileCompany.com/FastForwardPM. Look for them at the end of Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 16, and 18. Since these forms were first included in the second edition of this book, many firms have used them, adjusted them to fit their own projects, and adopted them as their own standards.
There are many effective project management software tools in the market, but by far the most common is Microsoft Project. Video tutorials for getting started with Project are part of the videos available at www.VersatileCompany.com/FastForwardPM.
Many project managers benefit from earning PMI's Project Management Professional certification. One requirement for earning this certification is passing a lengthy exam. As an aid in exam preparation, sample exam questions are provided at the end of most chapters. These exam questions, along with Chapter 24, which contains general advice on preparing for the exam, have been contributed by Tony Johnson, author of a leading PMP exam preparation course series.
The content of this book is aligned with terminology used on the exam. Many chapters have additional exam‐specific content available as video tutorials accessible at www.VersatileCompany.com/FastForwardPM.
Every increment of change in our rapidly transforming economies and societies is brought about by a project. As projects dominate the way we work, it is critical to understand project management.
Projects are defined as work that happens one time only and has both a clear beginning and end. This kind of work may be contrasted with the ongoing operations of an organization that involve repetitive work—such as manufacturing or retail—with no defined end.
As our workplace becomes increasingly project‐driven, organizations are investing in the ability to select and manage projects. Managers at every level play a role in creating successful projects. Project managers, in particular, must understand and practice the proven discipline of project management.
Innovation is created through projects, by project leaders who understand the real benefit the project brings to stakeholders. These leaders know their job is more than delivering to specification; they must be conscious of the original business goals that justified authorization of the project.
The purpose of this book is to help you gain these skills. Learn them and you will have every chance of steering a project from its planning stages through to its successful conclusion. For, while employing art and creativity are also important, the tools put forth in this book—the science of project management—provide the foundation for the success of any project.
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