Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme

Gain the skills and tools to become an effective project manager

Get ready for a more robust approach to project management - one that recognizes the project environment and adapts accordingly. This resource first introduces you to the tools, templates, and processes that you'll need in your toolkit. You'll then explore five different project management life cycle (PMLC) models for managing a project: Linear, Incremental, Iterative, Adaptive, and Extreme. Along the way, you'll find step-by-step guidance on how to apply each technique. All of this will give you a complete understanding of how to successfully complete projects on time and within budget.

This comprehensive guide shows you how to:

• Apply all nine Knowledge Areas defined in PMBOK
• Establish project management life cycles and strategies
• Decide the best method for managing specific types of projects
• Select and use best-of-breed project management tools and templates for each management task
• Utilize the Project Support Office, Project Portfolio Management, and Continuous Process Improvement programs
• Prevent projects from becoming distressed and create effective intervention strategies
• Manage multiple team projects by integratingthe tools, templates, and processes into a single team

With 200 pages of new content, the fifth edition of this popular guide gives new or veteran project managers a comprehensive overview of all of the best-of-breed project management approaches and tools today, including Traditional (Linear and Incremental), Agile (Iterative and Adaptive), and Extreme. Step-by-step instruction and practical case studies show you how to use these tools effectively to achieve better outcomes of projects at hand. Plus, the book provides full coverage on managing continuous process improvement, procurement management, managing distressed projects, and managing multiple team projects. The companion Web site includes exercises and solutions that accompany the project management instruction in the book.

Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice)

In the updated edition of this critically acclaimed and bestselling book, Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice), Microsoft project veteran Scott Berkun offers a collection of essays on field-tested philosophies and strategies for defining, leading, and managing projects. Each essay distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice, and the new edition now adds more value for leaders and managers of projects everywhere. Based on his nine years of experience as a program manager for Internet Explorer and lead program manager for Windows and MSN, Berkun explains to technical and non-technical readers alike what it takes to get through a large software or web development project. Making Things Happen doesn't cite specific methods, but focuses on philosophy and strategy. Unlike other project management books, Berkun offers personal essays in a comfortable style and easy tone that emulate the relationship of a wise project manager who gives good, entertaining and passionate advice to those who ask. Topics in this new edition include:

• How to make things happen
• Making good decisions
• Specifications and requirements
• Ideas and what to do with them
• How not to annoy people
• Leadership and trust
• The truth about making dates
• What to do when things go wrong

Complete with a new forward from the author and a discussion guide for forming reading groups/teams, Making Things Happen offers in-depth exercises to help you apply lessons from the book to your job. It is inspiring, funny, honest, and compelling, and definitely the one book that you and your team need to have within arm's reach throughout the life of your project. Coming from the rare perspective of someone who fought difficult battles on Microsoft's biggest projects and taught project design and management for MSTE, Microsoft's internal best practices group, this is valuable advice indeed. It will serve you well with your current work, and on future projects to come.

Based on his nine years of experience as a program manager for Microsoft’s biggest projects, Berkun explains to technical and non-technical readers alike what it takes to lead critical projects from start to finish. Here are 16 chapters on the critical and common challenges of leading projects and managing teams, diagrams, photography, and war stories of success and failure. Berkun offers practical tools and methods to make sure your projects succeed.

What To Do When Things Go Wrong
From Making Things Happen, Chapter 11

1. Calm down. Nothing makes a situation worse than basing your actions on fear, anger, or frustration. If something bad happens to you, you will have these emotions whether you’re aware of them or not. They will also influence your thinking and behavior whether you’re aware of it or not. (Rule of thumb: the less aware you are of your feelings, the more vulnerable you are to them influencing you.) Don’t flinch or overreact—be patient, keep breathing, and pay attention.

2. Evaluate the problem in relation to the project. Just because someone else thinks the sky has fallen doesn’t mean that it has. Is this really a problem at all? Whose problem is it? How much of the project (or its goals) is at risk or may need to change because of this situation: 5%? 20%? 90%? Put things in perspective. Will anyone die because of this mistake (you’re not a brain surgeon, are you?)? Will any cities be leveled? Plagues delivered on the innocent? Help everyone frame the problem to the right emotional and intellectual scale. Ask tons of questions and get people thinking rather than reacting. Work to eliminate assumptions. Make sure you have a tangible understanding of the problem and its true impact. Then, prioritize: emergency (now!), big concern (today), minor concern (this or next week), bogus (never). Know how long your fuse is to respond and prioritize this new issue against all existing work. If it’s a bogus issue, make sure whoever cried wolf learns some new questions to ask before raising the red flag again.

3. Calm down again. Now that you know something about the problem, you might really get upset (“How could those idiots let happen!?”). Find a way to express emotions safely: scream at the sky, workout at the gym, or talk to a friend. But do express them. Know what works for you, and use it. Then return to the problem. Not only do you need to be calm to make good decisions, but you need your team to be calm. Pay attention to who is upset and help them calm down. Humor, candor, food, and drink are good places to start. Being calm and collected yourself goes a long way toward calming others. And taking responsibility for the situation (see the later section “Take responsibility”), regardless of whose fault it was, accelerates a team’s recovery from a problem.

4. Get the right people in the room Any major problem won’t impact you alone. Identify who else is most responsible, knowledgeable, and useful and get them in together straight away. Pull them out of other meetings and tasks: if it’s urgent, act with urgency, and interrupt anything that stands in your way. Sit them down, close the door, and run through what you learned in step 2. Keep this group small; the more complex the issue, the smaller the group should be. Also, consider that (often) you might not be part of this group: get the people in the room, communicate the problem, and then delegate. Offer your support, but get out of their way (seriously—leave the room if you’re not needed). Clearly identify who is in charge for driving this issue to resolution, whether it’s you or someone else.

5. Explore alternatives. After answering any questions and clarifying the situation, figure out what your options are. Sometimes this might take some research: delegate it out. Make sure it’s flagged as urgent if necessary; don’t ever assume people understand how urgent something is. Be as specific as possible in your expectation for when answers are needed.

6. Make the simplest plan. Weigh the options, pick the best choice, and make a simple plan. The best available choice is the best available choice, no matter how much it sucks (a crisis is not the time for idealism). The more urgent the issue, the simpler your plan. The bigger the hole you’re in, the more direct your path out of it should be. Break the plan into simple steps to make sure no one gets confused. Identify two lists of people: those whose approval you need for the plan, and those who need to be informed of the plan before it is executed. Go to the first group, present the plan, consider their feedback, and get their support. Then communicate that information to the second group.

7. Execute. Make it happen. Ensure whoever is doing the work was involved in the process and has an intimate understanding of why he’s doing it. There is no room for assumption or ambiguity. Have specific checkpoints (hourly, daily, weekly) to make sure the plan has the desired effect and to force you and others in power to consider any additional effort that needs to be spent on this issue. If new problems do arise, start over at step 1.

8. Debrief. After the fire is out, get the right people in the room and generate a list of lessons learned. (This group may be different from the right people in step 4 because you want to include people impacted by, but not involved in, the decision process.) Ask the question: “What can we do next time to avoid this?” The bigger the issue, the more answers you’ll have to this question. Prioritize the list. Consider who should be responsible for making sure each of the first few items happens.

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: (Pmbok Guide)

The PMBOK9 Guide – Fourth Edition continues the tradition of excellence in project management with a standard that is even easier to understand and implement, with improved consistency and greater clarification.

• Standard language has been incorporated throughout the document to aid reader understanding.
• New data flow diagrams clarify inputs and outputs for each process.
• Greater attention has been placed on how Knowledge Areas integrate in the context of Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling, and Closing process groups.
• Two new processes are featured: Identify Stakeholders and Collect Requirements.

The PMBOK Guide is a standard for the project management profession. Its intention is to serve as a guide to the body of knowledge within the project management community and as practiced by members of the profession. There is no single document that contains the project management body of knowledge. Indeed, some of it is not published at all but, rather, is simply recognized as good practices and norms within the profession. This body of knowledge is growing every day.

The PMBOK Guide is not intended to be used to learn project management or project management concepts. It's especially not intended to teach or suggest PM techniques or methodologies.

This project management book is not a "how to" book nor is it a description of a methodology. It's a standard, not a methodology. PM professionals and the organizations they work for can use the PMBOK Guide as a guide for developing their own methodologies or for creating organization standards. 

It's particularly important to understand that it is not a standard or specification for the examination portion of the PMP certification. For one thing, at least 30% of the material on the examination is not covered by the PMBOK Guide. (There IS an exam on the PMBOK Guide. It's the CAPM exam, which only covers knowledge of the PMBOK Guide.)

While the PMBOK Guide only changes once every 4 years, the exam component of the PMP credential is constantly changing. Much of the material that showed up in the 4th (2008) edition of the PMBOK Guide has ALREADY been showing up on the PMP exam for several years - e.g., PTA, TCPI, etc. PMBOK Guide 4th edition came out in December, 2008, but these topics have been showing up on the PMP exam as early as 2006. The group at PMI that develops the standards (such the PMBOK Guide, the Standard for Risk Management, etc.) and the group at PMI that develops the the certifications and their corresponding exams (such as PMP, CAPM, PMI-SP, etc.) are two separate groups that DO NOT interface with each other. They are two separate groups. If anything, the standards group looks at the work that the credential group (PMP, CAPM) does and uses it as one of the many inputs for what they put into the standards such as the PMBOK Guide.

The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management (Portable Mba Series)

The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management (Portable Mba Series) is one of the bestselling books ever published on the topic of project management. Now in a revised new third edition, it presents you with a wealth of proven techniques for managing projects from establishing project objectives to building schedules to projecting costs. It includes all the basics on defining, planning, and tracking a project, as well as building stronger project teams. This new edition of the Fast Forward MBA in Project Management (Portable Mba Series) includes new chapters on Agile Project Management, PMI exam prep, and more.

Until the early '90s, project management was definitely located somewhere near the unsexy end of the business spectrum. But now, with the rise of downsizing and outsourcing, it has become one of the hot disciplines. Professional membership of the U.S.-based Project Management Institute has quadrupled in the last decade, and Microsoft claimed recently to have over 2 million users worldwide of its project-management software. The reasons for this growth are simple. Project management is about managing "projects," that is, unique pieces of work (as opposed to ongoing operations). Downsizing, outsourcing, and the accelerating pace of change have meant that, increasingly, work is carried out on an ad-hoc, one-off project basis. The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management  is designed as an advanced textbook for businesspeople with a grasp of the basics and insufficient time (or inclination) to go back to school to learn more. Written by Eric Verzuh, president of the Versatile Company, a leading project-management consultancy, this is not a heavy academic text.

Like the rest of the Fast Forward series, The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management (Portable Mba Series) is designed to let the reader extract maximum information in minimum time. There is a strong use of graphics with tables, charts cross-heads, and bullet points. Important passages are flagged in bold and/or emblazoned with the words key concept. When you read it, you realize that there is nothing magical about project management, just the application of careful common sense. The book covers all the basic stuff like planning, time-tabling, quantity and price estimation, resource allocation, and scheduling. But it also acknowledges that there is inevitably a political dimension to every project, no matter how small. So it has important sections on how to ensure that all the stakeholders in the project are kept "on board" and the importance of communication.

As Verzuh states in his introduction, "Every project participant from part-time team member to executive sponsor, becomes more effective once he or she understands the basics of project management." Really, this is a book about management that every manager should read, whether he or she has a project or not. --Alex Benady --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.