THE HANDBOOK OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT, A Practical Guide to Effective Policies and Procedures, Revised 2nd Edition, has been published by and is now available from Kogan Page publishers in the USA.

• The first edition of the book was a success in Great Britain, where the author Mr. Trevor Young is based. The newly updated book includes:
  New material on estimating and keeping projects on track, plus a new chapter on solving common project problems
• Includes a free CD-ROM containing tools, templates, procedures and more.

“This excellent handbook provides you with all you need to make your project a success. [It] is easy to read and has many diagrams, and flow charts that support the text very well.” Paul Duffy, APM Group, formerly the trading arm of the Association for Project Management, in a review of an earlier edition.

According to the announcement received by PMForum, The Handbook of Project Management is written specifically to help project managers improve their performance using tried and tested techniques. The package comprises a book plus free CD ROM containing a collection of tools, templates and procedures which support the methodology used in the book.

Written by an experienced practitioner, it will be particularly useful for those looking to develop project management skills, starting a new project, wishing to acquire new skills, or training others in project management skills. Packed with concepts and processes, tools and presentation materials, this comprehensive handbook will assist anyone responsible for converting strategy into reality.

The author Trevor L Young was a senior consultant for the Industrial Society of Great Britain where he designed and conducted public training courses in project management techniques and project leadership. He is now an independent consultant specializing in the introduction of program management. He is the author of Successful Project Management, part of the bestselling Creating Success series from Kogan Page.

Book Details: ISBN 13: 9780749449841; ISBN 10: 0749449845; Publication: August 2007; Price: $55.00; Binding: Paperback + CD-ROM; Extent: 303 pages; Format: 6 x 9; Discount: Professional; Author residence: Wiltshire, UK ; Subject: Project management, Business & management. The book is now available from bookstores, online suppliers, and www.koganpage.com. For inquiries, please contact Kogan Page, 525 South 4th Street, Suite 241, Philadelphia, PA 19147; Tel: 215-928-9112; Fax: 215-928-9113; info@koganpage.com.

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Head First PMP, A Brain Friendly Guide to Passing the Project Management Professional Exam, is a new book that PMForum has just received for review. Published by O’Reilly, the book’s authors are Jennifer Greene, PMP and Andrew Stellman, PMP. At 656 pages, this is an amazing book.

According to the back cover, the book uses “the latest research in neurobiology, cognitive science, and learning theory”… and employs a “..format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.”

According to the book’s promotion, “Head First PMP offers complete coverage of The PMBOK® Guide principles in a way that’s engaging, not tedious. This book helps you prepare for the certification exam with a unique method that goes beyond answers to specific questions and makes you think about the big picture of project management. By putting project management concepts into context, you will be able to understand, remember, and apply them – not just on the exam, but on the job.”

This is an amazing book, full of cartoons, diagrams, questionnaires and good advice. It’s also in one of the most interesting (and fun) formats we have seen. This is not an endorsement or book review, which will come later. This is just an announcement of a new project management book. But it’s quite a book!

More information about Head First PMP, a Brain Friendly Guide to Passing the Project Management Professional Exam, (ISBN13: 9780596102340 - ISBN10: 0596102348) by Jennifer Greene and Andrew Stellman is available at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596102340//.

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Project Management for Mere Mortals is a new book by Claudia Bacca, PMP, recently published by Addison-Wesley Professional publishers in the USA. In the book, Ms. Bacca offers the following top ten tips:

1. Be clear about the business result that your project has been commissioned to produce.
2. Plan the work the best way to get it done, then crash and fast track to get to the requested date.
3. As you complete an iteration of planning be sure to desk test this iteration against the previous iteration to verify you are still in scope.
4. Build completion criteria for each task. Completion criteria will keep both the project manager and the person working the task clear about what done looks like.
5. Team norms will help your team work together effectively.
6. The effect of taking on a change request is not always equal to the number of days provided in the estimate. Be aware of the incremental effect.
7. Build cost estimates for every task regardless of whether you are held accountable for a budget or not. You need the practice and later you can use these figures for Earned Value Management.
8. Calculate the cost of quality at the end of the planning phase and several times during the execution of the project. Doing this will help hone your skills to deliver a better quality project.
9. Build an effective plan to work with your executives the same way you work with your team.
10. Have an attitude of success. It’s contagious.

Also available to compliment her new book is a packaged LiveLessons video workshop by Claudia Bacca, which contains 17 sessions covering 7+ hours of project management training.

Claudia Bacca, PMP, PMI Certified OPM3® Assessor/Consultant, is an independent project management consultant, trainer and lecturer. She has lectured at private venues and PMI chapters across the world. Bacca has more than 20 years of project management experience and serves on the leadership team that produced the Project Management Maturity OPM3 standard. She contributed to Kim Heldman’s best-seller PMP: Project Management Professional Study Guide, and also served as its technical editor. She is coauthor of the PMP Project Management Professional Study Guide Deluxe Edition. Project Management for Mere Mortals, list price $44.99, published by Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-321-42345-3, is available through most book stores

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Journyx CEO Curt Finch has authored a new book entitled “All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource”. The book is based on the principle that all people and all businesses have a right to perform work that the market will reward them for. Mr. Finch explains the ways in which a time accounting platform can promote growth and lead a company to higher corporate profitability.

Curt’s new book explains how time tracking is an underutilized asset for corporations seeking to achieve higher profitability. All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy provides corporate executives with valuable information on achieving per-person, per-project profitability by being smarter in using time tracking data. Additional topics include payroll, billing, project management, project accounting and regulations compliance.

Finch applies his experiences and knowledge in an effort to educate business professionals on the needs of today’s knowledge worker economy, as well as where it is going in the future. Real-world case studies are included, such as Liz Claiborne, Telelogic and PFSweb.

The book addresses ideas such as:

• Web 2.0

• Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance

• How to create an effective corporate pay structure

• Key performance indicators

• Service oriented architecture

• Linux and open-source software

• Project accounting

• Software-as-a-service

According to Robert Virga, CEO of Accounting Software 411, “Curt's book is a paradigm-changing read and will open your mind to the power that time knowledge can bring to any organization."

“All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy” is available for purchase on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1430323833/. Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx, the first company to provide Web-based time-tracking and project accounting solutions that guide customers to per-person, per-project profitability. Customers include American Airlines, Bayer, AC Nielsen, L'Oreal and Symantec. For more information, visit www.journyx.com/company/about.html.

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A newly developed GAO Cost Assessment Guide is now available on the GAO’s website at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d071134sp.pdf. The GAO report number is GAO-07-1134SP and the PDF file has a link to a web-based comment survey on page 20. Program and project management professionals are invited to share comments so the Guide can be as up-to-date as possible. The GAO Cost Assessment Guide is available for public comment for the next year.

According to the Abstract, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is responsible for, among other things, assisting the US Congress in its oversight of the federal government, including agencies' stewardship of public funds. To effectively use public funds, the government must meet the demands of today's changing world by employing effective management practices and processes, including the measurement of government program performance. Legislators, government officials, and the public want to know whether government programs are achieving their goals and what their costs are.

GAO developed the Cost Guide in order to establish a consistent methodology, based on best practices, to be used across the US federal government for developing and managing program cost estimates. For the purposes of the guide, a cost estimate is the summation of individual cost elements, using established methods and valid data to estimate the future costs of a program, based on what is known today. The management of a cost estimate involves continually updating the estimate with actual data as they become available, revising the estimate to reflect changes, and analyzing differences between estimated and actual costs--for example, using data from a reliable earned value management (EVM) system.

The ability to generate reliable cost estimates is a critical function, necessary to support the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) capital programming process. Without this ability, agencies are at risk of experiencing cost overruns, missed deadlines, and performance shortfalls--all recurring problems that our program assessments too often reveal. Furthermore, cost increases often mean that the government cannot fund as many programs as intended or deliver them when promised.

The methodology outlined in this guide is a compilation of best practices that federal cost estimating organizations and industry use to develop and maintain reliable cost estimates throughout the life of a government program. By default, the guide will also serve as a guiding principle for GAO auditors to evaluate the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of US government programs. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and others have shown through budget simulations that the nation is facing a large and growing structural deficit in the long term, primarily because the population is aging and healthcare costs are rising. As the Comptroller General has noted, "Continuing on this unsustainable path will gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living and ultimately our national security."

New budgetary demands and demographic trends will place serious budgetary pressures on federal discretionary spending, as well as on other federal policies and programs, in the coming years. As resources become scarce, competition for them will increase. It is imperative, therefore, that government acquisition programs deliver as promised, not only because of their value to their users but because every dollar spent on one program will mean one less available dollar to fund other efforts. To get better results, programs will need higher levels of knowledge when they start and standardized monitoring metrics such as EVM so that better estimates can be made of total program costs at completion.

The new Guide was developed over the two years under the leadership of Karen Richey at GAO, with input and feedback from a team of dozens of government and industry program and project management experts.

According to Ms. Richey, “While it has been a long and difficult process to get something of this magnitude out for public comment, we believe our Guide helps fill a gap in federal government guidance and paves the way for agencies to be accountable for their program costs and outcomes. We hope that at the end of the exposure draft period, this Guide will be viewed as a useful tool that will identify best practices and offer transparency into how GAO will conduct an audit of a program's cost estimate or EVM data.”

The GAO Cost Assessment Guide is available on line at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d071134sp.pdf. It will be open for public comment for the next year.

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EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE FOR PROJECT MANAGERS: The People Skills You Need to Achieve Outstanding Results, a new book by Anthony Mersino, PMP, introduces readers to the basic concepts of emotional intelligence and shows how to apply them to their project goals. The book provides a framework for applying emotional intelligence to meet the unique challenges of project managers.

The book provides readers with tools, techniques, and guidance to:

• communicate more effectively with the project team and other stakeholders

• evaluate emotional information to make better decisions

• anticipate and avoid emotional breakdowns

• deal with difficult team members and manage conflict

• cast a vision for shared project objectives that will energize, inspire, and motivate the project team

• create a positive work environment and engender high team morale in order to attract and retain high performing project team members
  

The book includes checklists, self-assessments, and hands-on exercises, to help project managers get in touch with their own emotions in order to better handle the complicated challenges of managing projects of all kinds. According to the book’s announcement, it can help project managers become proficient in self-management, as well as social awareness, developing the ability to read and understand other people and respond to them with empathy. The book gives readers techniques for developing political savvy, setting up healthy emotional boundaries, and understanding the unspoken rules and norms of organizations.

Anthony Mersino, PMP, has more than 20 years of project management experience. He has worked at IBM, Ameritech, and Unisys, and consults for such clients as MWH Global, Abbott Laboratories, and NORC at the University of Chicago. He teaches courses for ESI International and Northwestern University and is a member of the National Speakers Association, the Project Management Institute, and the American Society for the Advancement of Project Management. He lives in Northfield, Illinois.

Title: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE FOR PROJECT MANAGERS, The People Skills You Need to Achieve Outstanding Results; Author: Anthony Mersino, PMP; ISBN: 978-0-8144-7416-7; Published by AMACOM; July 31, 2007; $19.95 Paperback. For more information or to purchase copies, call 1-800-714-6395 or visit AMACOM online at www.amacombooks.org.

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Max Wideman has announced the latest updates to his popular project management website. As a follow up to his announcement of Tom Mochal's TenStep PortfolioStep v. 3.0 last month, Max is launching a series of Papers explaining the changes, providing a more holistic approach and debunking some common mis-perceptions. Check out Ten Steps to Comprehensive Project Portfolio Management Part 1: An Introduction.

Max’s Guest this month is Russ Archibald, who returns with a two-part paper on The Purposes and Methods of Practical Project Categorization - Part 1.

In Musing, Max tries to answer the question: What should a Project Secretary do?

Have you seen Max’s book A Management Framework for Project, Program and Portfolio Integration? For information or to order a copy, visit http://www.maxwideman.com/papers/framework_book/intro.htm.
Do you have a project management question? Find the answer at: http://www.maxwideman.com.

 

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