The Rationale for Using This Book Organization

This book does not advocate following recipes and stepwise procedures lists for managing projects. Rather it is based on constructing a best-fit project management approach based on the characteristics of the project, its environment, the business climate, the team skills profile, and other descriptors.

A Bottom-Up Learning Experience

To begin your study I introduce six questions that form an architecture for any effective project management approach. As long as your chosen approach provides answers to these six questions, you will have defined an effective approach.

Learning about Process Groups

The Project Management Institute (PMI) has provided a comprehensive definition of the basic building blocks from which every project management methodology can be defined. You first learn these and then apply them later in the book to specific project management methodologies and models.

Learning about How Process Groups Form Life Cycle Processes

PMI defines the five basic process groups that can be used to form project management life cycle processes. Every effective project management life cycle will contain these five process groups. In some life cycles the process groups will appear once, in others several times.

Learning about Forming Strategies for Effective Life Cycle Management

In this book the profile of the project and the degree to which requirements are specified and documented form the strategies for defining the best-fit project management life cycle. As the project work commences, the profile of the project and the requirements definition may change, prompting a change of strategy. Always keeping the project management approach aligned with the changing profile of the project is the unique feature of my approach to project management.

Learning How the Organization Can Support Effective Project Management

The organization itself can be a supporter of or a hindrance to effective project management. I explore this in the three chapters Part III comprises.

Learning How to Adapt to the Realities of Projects

In Part IV you learn about two project situations that arise frequently and that are not discussed earlier in the book. Despite all of your planning and strategizing to choose best-fit project management approaches, the project can still fall into a distressed state. Knowing how to prevent this from happening through early warning metrics is of primary importance, and how to recover from a distressed state is also important. One chapter focuses on that topic. Another chapter focuses on the increasingly common multiple team project situation.

The final chapter in Part IV discusses a serious problem that most organizations have done very little to address — the career and professional development of their cadre of project managers. We are in the midst of an evolution of projects from defined efforts to very complex and uncertain efforts. The preparation of project managers to manage these challenges effectively won't happen by accident. It has to be planned, and it has to match the foreseeable future demands of these types of projects.