The Mindset for Creating Project Value


Book Description

Using empirical data from their research study, Thomas Lechler and John Byrne demonstrate that the success of a project strongly depends on the specific attitude of the project manager and the project management decision-making process. They also address: • Limiting effects of the Triple Constraints Paradigm • Role of uncertainty in projects. Leaders within organizations will find the results useful to emphasize and encourage entrepreneurial behaviors of project managers in a way that influences project performance beyond the simple application of tools and techniques. The book addresses several stakeholders, including who are responsible for implementing projects, those who suffer the consequences if things go wrong, and those who are responsible for the selection and development of project managers. The Mindset for Creating Project Value provides insight into how a different perspective is necessary to better understand the limitations of project management in order to better explain the many phenomena that are related to the management of projects and, consequently, to improve the practical outcome.




The Uncertainty Mindset


Book Description

Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a competitive necessity. A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizational form, the culinary research and development team, has emerged. The best of these R&D teams continually expand the frontiers of food—they invent a constant stream of new dishes, new cooking processes and methods, and even new ways of experiencing food. How do they achieve this nonstop novelty? And what can culinary research and development teach us about how organizations innovate? Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look at the R&D kitchen, The Uncertainty Mindset upends conventional wisdom about how to organize for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable.




Project Management Metrics, KPIs, and Dashboards


Book Description

Essential strategies from Harold Kerzner on measuring project management performance The maze-like path of today's projects reflects a business environment that's growing in complexity. Factors influencing projects, such as new advancements in computer technology, an unpredictable economy, and the increase in stakeholder involvement make metrics and key performance indicators (KPI) for project management an important focus. Such measures are commonly used to help an organization define and evaluate how successful it is, typically, in terms of making progress towards its long-term organizational goals. Project Management Metrics, KPIs, and Dashboards helps functional managers gain a thorough understanding of what metrics are and how they can be best implemented to gain traction in a fast-paced and diverse working atmosphere. With content aligned with PMI's PMBOK® Guide, this book offers extensive coverage on KPIs and how they may be monitored, using techniques such as business dashboards to assist in prescribing meaningful business strategies. After reading this book, functional managers will bolster their awareness of what good metrics management really entails—and be armed with the knowledge to measure performance more effectively. This book begins with basic KPI principles, helping functional managers deal with such key issues as: Successfully integrating KPIs and metrics into managing a project within a business strategy Important business dashboard techniques used in monitoring performance What is really important to different stakeholders in a project Managing resistance to change Next the book explores the key questions to ask before implementing a dashboard or reporting system. Some of these questions include: What are your needs? What is involved in integration? What's involved in operations and maintenance? What does the system cost? How long will the system last? Throughout the book, helpful illustrations clarify complex concepts and processes. These illustrations are also available as PowerPoint slides for course and seminar presentations.




Mindset


Book Description

From the renowned psychologist who introduced the world to “growth mindset” comes this updated edition of the million-copy bestseller—featuring transformative insights into redefining success, building lifelong resilience, and supercharging self-improvement. “Through clever research studies and engaging writing, Dweck illuminates how our beliefs about our capabilities exert tremendous influence on how we learn and which paths we take in life.”—Bill Gates, GatesNotes “It’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.” After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment. In this edition, Dweck offers new insights into her now famous and broadly embraced concept. She introduces a phenomenon she calls false growth mindset and guides people toward adopting a deeper, truer growth mindset. She also expands the mindset concept beyond the individual, applying it to the cultures of groups and organizations. With the right mindset, you can motivate those you lead, teach, and love—to transform their lives and your own.




Teaching the Entrepreneurial Mindset to Engineers


Book Description

This book provides engineering faculty members and instructors with a base understanding of why the entrepreneurial mindset is important to engineering students and how it can be taught. It helps advance entrepreneurship education for all engineering students, and equips educators with tools and strategies that allow them to teach the entrepreneurial mindset. Divided into four parts, this book explores what the entrepreneurial mindset is, and why it is important; shows how to get started and integrate the mindset into existing coursework so that curricula can focus on both technical/functional concepts and entrepreneurial ones as well; guides readers through the growing multitude of conferences, journals, networks, and online resources that are available; and provides solid examples to get the reader started. This book is an important resource for engineering educators as they learn how to remain competitive and cutting-edge in a field as fast-moving and dynamic as engineering.




EMPOWERED


Book Description

"Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech products?how to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the book's message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams"--




eXtreme Project Management


Book Description

Today’s new breed, eXtreme projects are different. They feature high speed, high change, high complexity, high risk, and high stress. While traditional projects follow the classic model of ready, aim, fire, eXtreme project managers succeed by shooting the gun and then redirecting the bullet while not loosing sight of their moving target. eXtreme Project Management provides a practical guide for leaders working under high risk and high pressure while producing the desired bottom-line results. Based on Doug DeCarlo’s extensive experience in working with more than 250 project teams, his eXtreme project management model is built around an integrated set of principles, values, skills, tools, and practices proven to consistently work under conditions of rapid change and uncertainty. eXtreme project management is based on the premise that you don’t manage the unknown the same way you manage the known. It’s a people-centric approach to high performance that makes quality of life a fundamental part of the project venture.




Customer-Centric Project Management


Book Description

There has been a sea-change in the focus of organizations - whether private or public - away from a traditional product- or service-centricity towards customer-centricity and projects are just as much a part of that change. Projects must deliver value; projects must involve stakeholders, and Elizabeth Harrin and Phil Peplow demonstrate convincingly that stakeholders are the ones who get to decide what ’value’ actually means. Customer-Centric Project Management is a short guide explaining what customer-centricity means in terms of how you work and its importance for project performance; using tools and processes to guide customer-centric thinking will help you see the results of engagement and demonstrate how things can improve, even on difficult projects. The text provides a straightforward implementation guide to moving your own business to a customer-centric way of working, using a model called Exceed and provides some guidance for ensuring that customer-centricity is sustainable and supported in the organization. This is a practical, rigorous and well-researched text. It draws on established models and uses the example of project implementation in a healthcare environment to demonstrate the impact of this significant way of thinking about value. The authors can’t guarantee that the Exceed process will radically improve project success rates, and no process can. Adopting a customer-centric mindset and using the Exceed process to measure and monitor customer satisfaction will, however, help you move towards working with happier, more engaged stakeholders.




Managing Value Co-creation in University-Industry Partnerships


Book Description

This book discusses how academic institutions can play a principal role in companies innovation strategy. The characteristics of University-Industry collaboration are strongly related to the social aspect of the activity of collaborating agents oriented towards a common object of work. To analyze this phenomenon, the author applies one of the concepts from the “Practice-Based Approach", namely the concept of the Activity Network to understand the collaboration process of R&D activities in a Nordic (Telia) and Swiss (Swisscom) Telecom Companies developing innovative products. The author focuses on four phases of University-Industry innovation partnership building: identification, selection, formation and navigation. The study shows the interactions between individuals, the contexts in which they act and explores ways in which collaborative value co-creation is managed. This pioneering research offers new theoretical insights and managerial implications on how these dynamics influence innovation in companies. It will thus be invaluable to international scholars, researchers of R&D and innovation as well as business managers.




Risk Navigation Strategies for Major Capital Projects


Book Description

Investors and managers of major projects know how often they result in cost overruns and schedule delays. Risk Navigation Strategies for Major Capital Projects builds on conventional best practice to provide a risk-based view of current practices for planning and executing large international projects. As economies of scale continue to drive projects to ever-higher levels of scope and complexity, new thinking about strategy and risk is required. Since major projects are highly exposed to external risks, the traditional view of predictability as something that can be mandated and ensured by rigorous application of conventional best practice has become a myth. Fresh thinking is required to manage projects today, and this book provides a framework for taking project management best practice to the next level. Risk Navigation Strategies for Major Capital Projects is intended for executives investing in major projects, project leaders and managers, as well as those with a teaching or research interest in project and risk management.