Monique Aubry - Böcker

The growing complexity of projects today, as well as the uncertainty inherent in innovative projects, is making obsolete traditional project management practices and procedures, which are based on the notion that much about a project is known at its start. The current high level of change and complexity confronting organizational leaders and managers requires a new approach to projects so they can be managed flexibly to embrace and exploit change. What once used to be considered extreme uncertainty is now the norm, and managing planned projects is being replaced by managing projects as they evolve. Successfully managing projects in extreme situations, such as polar and military expeditions, shows how to manage successfully projects in today’s turbulent environment. Executed under the harshest and most unpredictable conditions, these projects are great sources for learning about how to manage unexpected and unforeseen situations as they occur. This book presents multiple case studies of managing extreme events as they happened during polar, mountain climbing, military, and rescue expeditions. A boat accident in the Artic is a lesson on how an effective project manager must be ambidextrous: on one hand able to follow plans and on the other hand able to abandon those plans when disaster strikes and improvise new ones in response. Polar expeditions also illustrate how a team can use "weak links" to go beyond its usual information network to acquire strategic information. Fire and rescues operations illustrate how one team member’s knowledge can be transferred to the entire team. Military operations provide case material on how teams coordinate and make use of both individual and collective competencies.This groundbreaking work pushes the definitions of a project and project management to reveal new insight that benefits researchers, academics, and the practitioners managing projects in today’s challenging and uncertain times.

Organizations simply can no longer execute projects the same way they have in the past. Their managers must rethink methods and change in response to an evolving context that is confronting every organization. An efficient way to realize this change is to evaluate project management and organizational project management maturity. Project Management Maturity: Elevating Organizational Performance explains how such an evaluation not only provides an independent benchmark of project management performance but also recommends targeted actions for change and improvement.The book offers a framework to assess project management maturity at both the project and organizational levels. This framework was developed by academics and professionals tasked with evaluating project management maturity to improve organizational performance. To explain the steps required for a successful maturity evaluation, the book takes an action research approach to describe in detail the evaluation process. It further illustrates the process with a real-world case study of a maturity evaluation in a public sector organization. Presenting key findings and recommendations that follow from an evaluation, the book explains the four categories of results and describes general avenues for improvement based on the authors’ field experience. To help managers with their own evaluations, the book discusses how project management professionals have experienced the evaluation process and how they have transformed their organizations. It also presents how evaluators have experienced the process and how they have collaborated with project and organizational managers.

Organizations simply can no longer execute projects the same way they have in the past. Their managers must rethink methods and change in response to an evolving context that is confronting every organization. An efficient way to realize this change is to evaluate project management and organizational project management maturity. Project Management Maturity: Elevating Organizational Performance explains how such an evaluation not only provides an independent benchmark of project management performance but also recommends targeted actions for change and improvement.The book offers a framework to assess project management maturity at both the project and organizational levels. This framework was developed by academics and professionals tasked with evaluating project management maturity to improve organizational performance. To explain the steps required for a successful maturity evaluation, the book takes an action research approach to describe in detail the evaluation process. It further illustrates the process with a real-world case study of a maturity evaluation in a public sector organization. Presenting key findings and recommendations that follow from an evaluation, the book explains the four categories of results and describes general avenues for improvement based on the authors’ field experience. To help managers with their own evaluations, the book discusses how project management professionals have experienced the evaluation process and how they have transformed their organizations. It also presents how evaluators have experienced the process and how they have collaborated with project and organizational managers.

The growing complexity of projects today, as well as the uncertainty inherent in innovative projects, is making obsolete traditional project management practices and procedures, which are based on the notion that much about a project is known at its start. The current high level of change and complexity confronting organizational leaders and managers requires a new approach to projects so they can be managed flexibly to embrace and exploit change. What once used to be considered extreme uncertainty is now the norm, and managing planned projects is being replaced by managing projects as they evolve. Successfully managing projects in extreme situations, such as polar and military expeditions, shows how to manage successfully projects in today’s turbulent environment. Executed under the harshest and most unpredictable conditions, these projects are great sources for learning about how to manage unexpected and unforeseen situations as they occur. This book presents multiple case studies of managing extreme events as they happened during polar, mountain climbing, military, and rescue expeditions. A boat accident in the Artic is a lesson on how an effective project manager must be ambidextrous: on one hand able to follow plans and on the other hand able to abandon those plans when disaster strikes and improvise new ones in response. Polar expeditions also illustrate how a team can use "weak links" to go beyond its usual information network to acquire strategic information. Fire and rescues operations illustrate how one team member’s knowledge can be transferred to the entire team. Military operations provide case material on how teams coordinate and make use of both individual and collective competencies.This groundbreaking work pushes the definitions of a project and project management to reveal new insight that benefits researchers, academics, and the practitioners managing projects in today’s challenging and uncertain times.