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This book is more for Business Project Sponsors to provide them with an overview of the management issues in Projects. It is easy to read and interspersed with quotes and cartoons to illustrate the points, review lists at end of each chapter, and several diagrams to help understand the overall management framework for monitoring projects (for example see page 453). The author starts with a problem analysis (page 9) and then 10 lessons learned (page 17) from a benchmarking study of major companies across a number of industries. The objective was to learn from the best. The lessons in summary relate to:
This is the only book that I have encountered that adequately explains the Stage (or Phase) gating framework. The framework is used to allow management to monitor projects during their life cycle to ensure they are meeting original business objectives, and to determine if they should continue to proceed. He explains the principles of why, how it works including the entry criteria to be fulfilled to allow projects to proceed to the next stage (note that he uses entry criteria rather than exit criteria). One of the checklists he provides is a Project health check (page 405), which is simple and quite easy to perform, yet quite comprehensive and powerful means of measuring risk (included on CD-ROM as excel spreadsheet). He also provides some high level views of PM principles and in particular has drawn on latest Project Schedule Management principles from Eli Goldratt's Theory of constraints and Critical Chain scheduling. He explains the principles in an easy to understand fashion and also one of their key project indicators which is the degree of buffer penetration compared to progress along the critical chain. This material would be useful introduction to the topic for both Project Managers and Sponsors. Another of the key issues he covers is the problem that most organisations have of too many projects and the need for a balanced project portfolio. How to select projects is addressed including utilising Theory of Constraints, which identifies the key constraint, most often resources, and manages project start-ups based on the availability of the constraint. Both Project Managers and Sponsors will find this book useful in providing an organisation context for improving project outcomes. Copyright Strategic Project Solutions Pty Ltd 2001 |
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