Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 69 - May 2020): Project Management

Know how to lead and establish business agility in your organization. Benefit from clear, actionable steps based on change management truths that have been long underutilized and have limited the success of agile expansion into your business. This book provides a pragmatic framework for leading your business toward shifting to an agile mindset. Achieving Business Agility offers strategies and concrete examples to engage business executives and will teach you how to effectively execute these strategies. Whether you are a delivery executive, a change advocate, a consultant, a business leader, or a newcomer to agile, you will learn clear actions from a practical, business-oriented perspective that is vital to effect change and bring agile into your business. The book is structured in three sections. The first provides you with a deep understanding of each of four strategies. The second section tells the story of a company that applied these strategies through the eyes of several key players. The last section helps you get started applying what you learned in your own company. What You'll Learn Get the attention of your executives by alerting them to a company problem that can impact them personally and create a sense of urgency to address it Collaborate with your executives in a way that gets them to open up and to see how their operating model is a contributing cause to the company problem Demonstrate how your executives can specifically benefit from a new agile business operating model and address the company problem Create a reinforcement structure on a larger scale to establish agile as the new standard operating model in your organization Who This Book Is For Managers, business leaders, and consultants at/for large enterprises or small startups who want their company to better compete in today's fast-moving markets that present threats and opportunities at every turn. No agile expertise is required.

Utilize a set of practical guidelines to help your Agile organization elevate software design quality as an important business driver to achieve customer satisfaction and, ultimately, higher revenue for your company. This is the first book to focus on a holistic quality view--what it is and how it links to overall business enhancements. The real-world examples used in this book allow you to learn and apply similar strategies and guidelines to help create a quality blueprint for your organization. Five pillars of quality are defined that can be used for any industry and, once internalized, can serve as a set of tools to continuously improve and measure the key factors impacting quality. What You'll Learn Be aware of the key elements in any transformation that involves culture Link quality and business outcomes Understand quality and its holistic definition and why continuous improvement is still a relevant approach in enhancing quality Follow guidelines with specific examples that can be applied to any product release in any type of industry to improve quality and enhance Agile processes Utilize relevant metrics to measure and continuously improve to make incremental positive changes Who This Book Is For Individuals at various levels in organizations--from Agile scrum teams, all the way up to executive leadership

Use this study guide to prepare for the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) exam, based on PMBOK's sixth edition, administered by the Project Management Institute (PMI). The revised and updated second edition of the best-selling CAPM in Depth has a laser-sharp focus on the exam objectives for project managers and others who want to pass the CAPM exam. No prior knowledge of project management is assumed.  The chapters and the sections within each chapter are presented in a logical learning sequence. The concepts and topics, both simple and complex, are clearly explained when they appear for the first time. This facilitates step-wise learning, prevents confusion, and makes this book useful for those who want to get up to speed quickly to pass the CAPM exam, even if you are new to the discipline of project management. This book tells the story of project management in a cohesive, concise, yet comprehensive fashion. Unlike most CAPM exam books, this book is not just an exam-cram book. It is an easy-to-understand guide that is a valuable reference both before and after the exam.  What You'll Learn  Understand the body of knowledge required to earn the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) certification Acquire the knowledge needed to successfully manage projects in any field  Who This Book Is For  Project management practitioners preparing for the CAPM exam, entry-level project managers and project team members preparing for the CAPM exam, beginners who want to join the field of project management and get up to speed quickly, project managers who need a quick and easy reference to the discipline of project management, instructors and trainers who need a textbook for a course on project management

Collaborating in virtual teams is a new reality in modern project management and work environments. Its emergence calls for an extensive analysis and re-alignment on the part of organizations, so as to help virtual teams maintain 'strategic momentum' - a concept that this book introduces. Strategic momentum represents perseverance with regard to pursuing a virtual team's strategy; a 'flywheel'  concept that drives the team members to concentrate on the project tasks until they have reached their shared goal.   The authors present a design science based model, together with an in-depth qualitative study involving eight virtual R&D project teams. In this model, strategic momentum is assessed in terms of empowerment, team task insight, and collective commitment. These three determinants can be promoted and sustained by various contextual factors and interventions on the part of the management. The authors also provide a wealth of practical tips to help practitioners and consultants generate and sustain strategic momentum in their own contexts when working with virtual teams.  

Utilize this comprehensive guide in your organization to create a corporate incubator that protects innovative ideas from oppressive corporate processes and culture and gives those ideas the resources and environment they need to grow and have the best possible chance to thrive. Innovation is hard. Ironically, innovation in a large enterprise can be even more difficult. Policies designed for mature businesses often crush emerging businesses along with the entrepreneurial spirit of the innovators. Procedures can make it difficult, even impossible, for innovative employees to get their ideas funded, or even seen. As a result, even companies with their roots in innovation can find themselves unable to innovate, with a devastating impact on employee morale and often resulting in the exodus of the most creative employees. In Lean Intrapreneurship the authors leverage decades of personal experience innovating in large enterprises to explore the root causes of failure to innovate in established organizations, and offer a solution to the innovator's dilemma. The book includes a recipe for creating a repeatable program for innovating in large organizations, including tools, tips, and strategies developed by the authors as they created an innovative incubation program for a multi-billion-dollar technology company. It also offers a wealth of information to help aspiring intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life. What You'll Learn Discover the most common reasons that innovation fails in established organizations Explore techniques to make innovative ideas a success Follow a recipe to create a program to enable innovation across your company Understand the power of transparency inside and outside an incubator Develop employees and foster a culture of innovation across your company Who This Book Is For Anyone with an innovative idea who wants to make it real but does not know where to begin; anyone struggling to innovate inside an established company; anyone who wishes to make their existing company more lean, agile, and efficient; anyone who wishes to start a program to incubate new, innovative ideas inside an established company

Use this study guide to prepare for the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam administered by the Project Management Institute (PMI). The revised third edition of the best-selling PMP in Depth, updated to the sixth edition of PMBOK, has a laser-sharp focus on the exam objectives for project managers and others who want to pass the PMP exam. No prior knowledge of project management is assumed.  The chapters and the sections within each chapter are presented in a logical learning sequence. The concepts and topics, both simple and complex, are clearly explained when they appear for the first time. This facilitates step-wise learning, prevents confusion, and makes this book useful for those who want to get up to speed quickly to pass the PMP exam, even if you are new to the discipline of project management. This book tells the story of project management in a cohesive, concise, yet comprehensive fashion. Unlike most PMP exam books, PMP in Depth covers the material in the order in which projects are actually run in the real world. The book is an easy-to-understand guide that is valuable both before and after the exam.  What You'll Learn  Understand the body of knowledge required to earn the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification  Acquire the knowledge needed to enter the field of project management and successfully manage projects in any field Who This Book Is For  Project management practitioners preparing for the PMP exam, entry-level project managers and project team members preparing for the PMP exam, beginners who want to join the field of project management and get up to speed quickly, project managers who need a quick and easy reference to the discipline of project management, and instructors and trainers who want a textbook for the PMP exam or a course on project management

Exploring the three levels of project management, this edited collection analyses the practice of problem structuring approaches (PSAs) with an aim to improve organisational adaptability and value creation. By studying these approaches, the authors present techniques for enhancing project management knowledge, informing decision-making and guiding management actions. This book is an insightful and timely read, as it addresses the need for organisations to adapt in order to tackle new challenges within today's changing business landscape. Undoubtedly useful to those studying project management and operational research, this book is also an important read for managers and decision-makers within organisations as it identifies and examines the effective outcomes of PSAs.

This book is a complete project management toolkit for project leaders in business, research and industry. Projects are approved and financed to generate benefits. Project Management: A Benefit Realisation Approach proposes a complete framework that supports this objective - from project selection and definition, through execution, and beyond implementation of deliverables until benefits are secured.  The book is the first to explain the creation of organisational value by suggesting a complete, internally-consistent and theoretically rigorous benefit-focused project management methodology, supported with an analytical technique: benefit engineering. Benefit engineering offers a practical approach to the design and maintenance of an organisation's project portfolio.  Building upon the authors' earlier successful book, Project Management for the Creation of Organisational Value, this comprehensively revised and expanded new book contains the addition of new chapters on project realisation. The book offers a rigorous explanation of how benefits emerge from a project. This approach is developed and strengthened -- resulting in a completely client-oriented view of a project. Senior executives, practitioners, students and academics will find in this book a comprehensive guide to the conduct of projects, which includes robust models, a set of consistent principles, an integrated glossary, enabling tools, illustrative examples and case studies.

This book aims to account for how project learning and adaptation occurs through Developmental Evaluation (DE), especially under conditions of uncertainty, complexity and change. Drawing on enactive cognitive science, the author presents a DE framework designed to augment traditional monitoring and evaluation activities. Discussing this framework in detail, the author also reports upon an extended case project investigating the sustainability of a market town in the UK. The framework aims to support the reader in capturing second-order learning and exploring opportunities for innovative responses to dynamic, uncertain and complex operational conditions. Recommendations are offered for future research, and how the framework might be incorporated into the design and funding of projects deployed to work with wicked problems.