Leading Project Teams


Book Description

The Second Edition of Leading Project Teams offers an accessible introduction to the important basics of project management while providing key issues and pointers on team leadership. Easy to read, this engaging book assumes little to no knowledge of project management. Leading Project Teams quickly leads the reader through the fundamentals including how to start a project, how to assign tasks, how to write clear project reports, and much, much more! New to the Second Edition: - New chapter on Risk Assessment - New coverage of running effective team meetings - Offers real world scenarios: Each chapter opens with a real-world project problem faced by a project leader. Selected from a wide range of industries--from academia to business to health care--each situation portrays how project work applies to real project problems in a variety of settings. - Identifies key expectations of project leaders: Concrete advice is given on leading project teams across a number of important leadership issues and on how project leaders should develop and guide project team members. - Provides quick-learning project tools: Many accessible tools are provided to help readers understand the basics of project management such as the work breakdown structure and project scheduling. Extensive coverage on team literature is offered to help students learn the basics of team construction and team dynamics.




Developing Strengths-Based Project Teams


Book Description

Developing Strengths-Based Project Teams integrates common project management and strengths-based talent development language to help you and your project team learn about and become a strengths-based project team. Everyone has talents and strengths. Everyone does projects. This book is designed for project managers, team members, and stakeholders who have an interest in talent development—not only their own talents and strengths, but also the combined talents and strengths of their project teams. Learn about the characteristics of a strengths-based project team. Apply a series of building blocks for individual and team strengths-based development. Through exercises, templates, action plans, and reflective questions, learn how to cultivate the collective strengths of project team members to become a strengths-based project team. Explore the various project management roles for sustaining a strengths-based project team culture. Create an environment in which team members can use their talent development tools long-term to develop and apply what they naturally do best—resulting in higher project team performance.




Project Team Leadership and Communication


Book Description

This is a business application/textbook designed for students and business professionals who are entering into their first project leadership role. Chapters cover the basics of leadership, team dynamics, project fundamentals/management, project communication, some common pitfalls to avoid, and a practical discussion of up-and-coming Agile methods. Chapters: Understanding Leadership, Project Fundamentals, Prioritization: The Core of Project Leadership, Team Structure and Development, Communication and Expectation Management, Pitfalls to Identify and Avoid, (Appendix) Agile: The Future of Projects?




Project Team Dynamics


Book Description

Get to the Heart of Building Productive Project Teams! Companies that embrace the power of collaboration realize that the best way to solve complex problems is to build cohesive teams made up of members with different skills and expertise. Getting teams to work productively is at the heart of project management. Developing the structure for teams to work dynamically at a high level of efficiency and effectiveness is at the heart of this book. The author clearly outlines methods for creating and implementing a structure to deal with the inevitable difficulties that any team may encounter. With examples drawn from contemporary project management, she demonstrates the effectiveness of this straightforward approach and highlights the risks of not building a strong team culture. The author offers simple and proven techniques for: • Launching a team • Defining and clarifying the goals of the team • Implementing and reinforcing appropriate team behaviors To help ensure the delivery of on-time project objectives, the author also gives practical advice aimed at ensuring productive team meetings, encouraging information sharing, and moving the team toward solutions in the face of challenges and conflict.




Project Retrospectives


Book Description

This is the digital copy of the printed booik (Copyright © 2001). With detailed scenarios, imaginative illustrations, and step-by-step instructions, consultant and speaker Norman L. Kerth guides readers through productive, empowering retrospectives of project performance. Whether your shop calls them postmortems or postpartums or something else, project retrospectives offer organizations a formal method for preserving the valuable lessons learned from the successes and failures of every project. These lessons and the changes identified by the community will foster stronger teams and savings on subsequent efforts. For a retrospective to be effective and successful, though, it needs to be safe. Kerth shows facilitators and participants how to defeat the fear of retribution and establish an air of mutual trust. One tool is Kerth's Prime Directive: Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. Applying years of experience as a project retrospective facilitator for software organizations, Kerth reveals his secrets for managing the sensitive, often emotionally charged issues that arise as teams relive and learn from each project.




Agile Project Management with Kanban


Book Description

"With Kanban, every minute you spend on a software project can add value for customers. One book can help you achieve this goal: Agile Project Management with Kanban. Author Eric Brechner pioneered Kanban within the Xbox engineering team at Microsoft. Now he shows you exactly how to make it work for your team. Think of this book as {28}Kanban in a box.




Team Topologies


Book Description

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.




Team Development for High-tech Project Managers


Book Description

This unique volume is the first to go beyond the theory of team dynamics and project management to present real world applications. The culmination of years of experience and research, the book describes practical techniques for building successful high performance project teams using actual examples from high tech companies. A concise guide for both new and experienced managers, this valuable resource enables you to: select the right projects for your organization; reduce the time needed for team development and productive operation; learn motivational and retention strategies for technical project personnel; avoid project management pitfalls; and inject quality into current and future projects. The book examines the typical life cycle of team development and the general mechanics of team and project formation in today's project management setting. It scrutinizes both successes and failures in nurturing and developing a team, offering techniques and suggestions on building better teams in thefuture.




Project Team Rewards


Book Description

This book gives you a comprehensive introduction to rewards in general and project team rewards in particular. Motivation theories and their impact on designing a reward system are explained. Throughout the book six so-called 'reward questions' are considered that need to be answered for designing a reward system. These reward questions are: Rewarding or not rewarding? Whom to reward? What to reward? What kind of reward? How much reward? When to reward? In addition, impacts of variable factors that may influence the answers to the reward questions are identified and explained. Some of those factors are employee's age, the company's culture but also project characteristics such as goal clarity, applied success criteria, project duration or member fluctuation. Please note that this book originally was written as a Master's Thesis. Accordingly, you should not expect to read a 'normal' text book but a Master's Thesis. Visit www.project-team-rewards.com for more details.




Improving Project Performance


Book Description

The approach to project management is too often formulaic, describing what should be done and how to do it, but not adequately describing why those actions are important. Improving Project Performance outlines the what and how of project management, emphasizing why actions matter, the overall intention of the formulaic steps, and the strengths or weakness of various tools and techniques. Successful project teams must understand and focus intently on what Wellman describes as the eight essential habits of successful project teams: -Nurture a shared vision of what is to be accomplished -Translate that vision into a coherent set of performance specifications -Have an integrated plan for accomplishing the purpose -Measure their performance against the plan and their progress toward the requirements -Allow for uncertainty -Manage change -Continually act to influence their future -Over-communicate