The Practice of Project Management

In today's highly competitive and fast-paced environment, the rapid creation and delivery of high-quality products and services is critical to business survival. To meet these demands, modern businesses need to operate at high performance levels, harnessing the full power of their resources to focus on strategic and business objectives, and deliver business benefits.

Traditional project management has tended to focus primarily on the processes of managing projects to successful completion. To manage projects from their inception through to actual delivery of the business enabling objectives, a different project management approach is needed. Project management needs to become part of the business and, in order to achieve this, organizations need to come to terms with the business of project management.

This book addresses the concepts and issues of business project management. It aims to assist organizations in making the shift from a narrow, strong, technical focus on project management to a broader, more business-oriented focus. The Practice of Project Management introduces three basic concepts which underpin the philosophy of the business-focused approach:

• Business Focused Project Management (BFPMTM)
• The WrappersTM model
• Objective Directed Project Management (ODPMTM).

Packed with unique concepts, processes and models, this comprehensive title will assist anyone who is responsible for converting strategy into reality. It will also enable the development of project management skills to complement technical expertise, and allow readers to provide the project skills their customers demand.

Invaluable reading for:

• senior managers and professionals responsible for converting strategy to reality;
• portfolio managers overseeing a business-focused group of initiatives;
• project managers and team members responsible for delivery of results that enable
• business outcomes to be achieved;
• programme and project sponsors;
• project administrators;
• technical project participants.

Contents

• Part I The Essential Building Blocks
• 1 Projects and project management
• 2 The context of project management

• Part II Focusing Projects on the Business
• 3 Projects and strategies linkages
• 4 The Wrappers™ model
• 5 Implementing Business Focused Project Management

• Part III Objective Directed Project Management (ODPM)
• 6 Introduction to ODPM
• 7 The project initiation phase
• 8 The project definition phase
• 9 The project planning phase
• 10 The project execution phase
• 11 The project close-out phase

• Appendix A: The conference project
• Appendix B: Basic concepts, tools and techniques
• Appendix C: Reasons for failure and guidelines for success