Project Management Essentials For Dummies, Australian and New Zealand Edition

Nick Graham, Stanley E. Portny

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780730319542
• eBook ISBN: 9780730319566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión de proyectos

The fast and easy way to perfect your project management skills

Whatever your profession, effective project management skills are crucial to developing a successful business career. In Project Management Essentials For Dummies, you'll find all the information and guidance you need to plan your projects with confidence and deliver them on time. This comprehensive resource will help you unlock the keys to project management success, gain the know-how to assess your strengths and weaknesses to maximise your project management potential, find proven ways to motivate your project team, and so much more.

In today's challenging business environment, professionals are increasingly working within tight timeframes and constricted budgets, and striving to deliver projects under a range of high-pressure scenarios. Thankfully, Project Management Essentials For Dummies shows you how to put out the fires igniting your workspace and explains how easy it is to organise, estimate and schedule projects more efficiently. In no time, you'll be managing deliverables, assessing risks, maintaining communications, making the most of your resources and utilising time-saving technologies like a project management ninja!

• Understand how to develop your plans around a sturdy structure — from start to finish
• Discover how to select the right people and get the very best from your team
• Recognise ways to take control and steer your projects to success
• Get up to speed on mastering the basics of project management

If you're a business professional looking to take your project management skills to new heights — but don't want to get bogged down with forehead-scratching jargon and complex methodologies — Project Management Essentials For Dummies has everything you need to get up and running fast.

Chapter 1

Project Management: The Key to Achieving Results

In This Chapter

Avoiding the common pitfalls that lead to project failure

Working out if you’re dealing with a ‘job’ or a ‘project’

Coming to grips with the Project Manager’s role

Knowing what to do at each stage in the project

Running projects well is fast becoming an essential management skill. Many organisations, private and public sector, now recognise that they are losing money and business opportunities unnecessarily because they are failing to plan and control their projects effectively. Companies, charities and public sector organisations are constantly changing, and ever faster, as they adapt to new market conditions, business practices, regulatory requirements and technology. Running projects often creates the change, and as a result businesses are increasingly driven to find individuals who can excel in this project-oriented environment.

So, hang on tight — you’re going to need an effective set of skills and techniques to steer your projects to successful completion. This chapter gets you off to a great start by showing you what project management involves and offers some insight on why projects succeed or fail.

This chapter also gets you into the project management mindset by outlining the Project Manager’s role and covers the lifespan of the project, from the initial idea, right through to closure.

Taking on a Project

Because you’re reading this book, chances are you’ve been asked to manage a project for the first time or you’re already involved in projects and looking for easier and better ways of doing things. If the project is indeed your first one, that’s a challenge that gives you an opportunity to excel in something you haven’t done before; for many, managing a project even opens a door to a new career.

The really good news here, whether you’re completely new or have some experience, is that project management has been around for a long while. In that time, Project Managers have come up with highly effective strategies and a range of very practical techniques. You can benefit from all that experience, and this book takes you through what you need to know.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

By following a sound approach to the project, you avoid many pitfalls that continue to contribute to, or cause, project failure on a mind-boggling scale. You may ask why, if good ways of doing things are out there, people ignore them and then see their projects fail. Good question. People make the same project mistakes repeatedly, and they’re largely avoidable.

The following list looks at the main causes of project failure. The list makes for depressing reading, but gives a good background against which to contrast successful project management and the approach in this book.

• Lack of clear objectives: Nobody’s really sure what the project is about, and even fewer agreed with it.
• Lack of risk management: Things go wrong that someone could easily have foreseen and then controlled to some degree or even prevented.
• No senior management ‘buy in’: Senior managers were never convinced and so never supported the project, leading to problems such as lack of resources. Neither did those managers exercise normal management supervision as they routinely do in their other areas of responsibility.
• Poor planning: Actually, that’s being kind, because often the problem is that no planning was done at all. It’s not surprising, then, that things run out of control.
• No clear progress milestones: The lack of milestones means nobody sees when things are off track, and problems go unnoticed for a long time.
• Understated scope: The scope and the Project Plan are superficial and understate both what the project needs to deliver and the resources needed to deliver it. The additional work that is necessary then takes the project out of control, causing delay to the original schedule and overspending against the original budget.
• Poor communications: Many projects fail because of communication breakdown, which can stem from unclear roles and responsibilities, and from poor senior management attitudes.
• Unrealistic resource levels: It just isn’t possible to do a project of the required scope with such a small amount of resource — staff, money or both.
• Unrealistic timescales: The project just can’t deliver by the required time, so it’s doomed to failure.
• No change control: People add in things bit by bit — scope creep. Then it dawns on everyone that the project’s grown so big that it can’t be delivered within the fixed budget or by the set deadline.

That’s ten reasons for failure, but you can probably think of a few more. The interesting thing about these problems is that avoiding them is, for the most part, actually not that difficult.

Deciding if the Job Is a Project

Before you start to think too deeply about running a project, check whether it really is one. Consider these three things:

• Is it a one-off job or something that’s ongoing? If the job is continuous, then it’s business as usual, not a project.
• Does the job justify project controls? Project management means incurring some overheads, but some jobs are so straightforward they just don’t need that degree of control.
• This last one may sound a little weird, and it certainly doesn’t fit with the formal definitions; it’s the question, ‘Do you want to handle the job as a project?’ You may choose to deal with a block of work as a project, but we wouldn’t — sometimes you have a choice.

Grasping the four control areas

Projects, large or small, involve four areas of control:

• Scope: What the project will deliver
• Time: When the project will deliver
• Quality: So often forgotten, but an essential dimension
• Resource: Necessary amounts of peo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents at a Glance
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Project Management: The Key to Achieving Results
• Chapter 2: Defining the Project and Producing a Business Case
• Chapter 3: Knowing the Stakeholders
• Chapter 4: Planning with Deliverables First
• Chapter 5: You Want This Project Done When?
• Chapter 6: Looking at Resources
• Chapter 7: Planning at Different Times and Levels
• Chapter 8: Managing the Risk
• Chapter 9: Organising the Project
• Chapter 10: Working with Teams and Specialists
• Chapter 11: Tracking Progress and Staying in Control
• Chapter 12: Closing the Project
• Chapter 13: Ten Questions to Ask Yourself for Project Planning
• Index
• About the Authors
• Business & Investing
• Connect with Dummies