SECTION I

KEY ASPECTS OFPROJECT MANAGEMENT

INTRODUCTION

As we noted in the introduction, one key element in the management of projects involvesthe need to grasp the essentials, the execution-based, ‘‘on time, in budget, to scope,’’

delivery-focused view of project management. These ‘‘walk before we can run’’ practicestend to revolve strongly around a blend of ‘‘control’’ and people, or organizational, issuesthat make project management such a challenging activity. The first two chapters in thissection take a summary view of project control; the second two of key organizational andpeople issues.

Peter Harpum in Chapter 1 kicks off with an authoritative look at project control andits way of looking at the discipline. Pete positions project control within a ‘‘systems’’ context,reminding us that, in the cybernetic sense, control involves planning as well as monitoring,and also taking corrective action. All the fundamental levers of project control are touchedupon. But as in a proper ‘‘systems’’ way of looking at things, Pete reminds us that projectsexist within bigger systems, and hence we need to relate project control to business strat-egy—or the project’s equivalent contextual objectives.

Managing project risks is an absolutely fundamental skill at any level of management—including this ‘‘base’’ level of project management, as PMBOK, of course, recognizes. Proj-ects, by definition, are unique: Doing the work necessary to initiate, plan, execute, control,and close out the project inevitably entails risks. These, as Steve Simister in Chapter 2succinctly summarizes, will need to be managed, and Steve proposes a ‘‘risk strategy-identification-analysis-response-control’’ process for doing so.

To effectively mobilize the resources needed to manage the project, a great deal needsto be understood about the organizational structures and systems, and roles and responsi-bilities, that must be harnessed to undertake the project. Erik Larson, in Chapter 3, providesa solid overview of the principal forms of organization structure found in project manage-

The Wiley Guide to Managing Projects. Edited by Peter W. G. Morris and Jeffrey K. PintoCopyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

2 The Wiley Guide to Managing Projects

ment. Erik concentrates particularly on the matrix form but shows the types of factors thatwill affect the choice of organization structure. Each of these choices, deliberate or otherwise,will have a tremendous impact on the resulting likelihood of successful project management.

Then, in Chapter 4, Dennis Slevin and Jeff Pinto provide a broad overview of somekey behavioral factors impacting successful project management. Drawing on original re-search on practicing project managers specially carried out for this book, they summarizethese into 12 critical issues that impact the performance of the project manager, rangingfrom the personal (‘‘micro’’) to the organizational (‘‘macro’’).

This first section builds the base for the follow-on chapters. Project management isshown to be best done when we appreciate the required blending of human (behavioral)and control elements, recognizing them not as competing but as complementary challenges,and maintaining our view of the horizon to always incorporate these fundamental issues.

About the Authors

Peter Harpum

Peter Harpum is a project management consultant with INDECO Ltd, with significantexperience in the training and development of senior staff. He has consulted to companiesin a wide variety of industries, including retail and merchant banking, insurance, pharma-ceuticals, precision engineering, rail infrastructure, and construction. Assignments rangefrom wholesale organizational restructuring and change management, through in-depthanalysis and subsequent rebuilding of program and project processes, to development ofindividual peoples’ project management capability. Peter has a deep understanding of projectmanagement processes, systems, methodologies, and the ‘‘soft’’ people issues that programsand projects depend on for success. Peter has published on design management; projectmethodologies, control, and success factors; capability development; portfolio and programvalue management; and internationalization strategies of indigenous consultants. He was aLecturer, Visiting Lecturer and examiner at UMIST on project management between 1999and 2003.

Stephen Simister

Dr. Simister is a consultant and lecturer in project management and a director of his owncompany, Oxford Management & Research Ltd., and an Associate of INDECO Ltd. Hisspecialism is working with clients to define the scope and project requirements to meet theirbusiness needs, facilitating group decision support workshops that allow these requirementsto be articulated outside suppliers of goods and services, and facilitating both value and riskmanagement workshops. He has experience of most business sectors and has been involvedin all stages of project life cycles. As a Fellow of the Association for Project Management(APM), Stephen is currently Chairman of the Contracts & Procurement Specific InterestGroup. He is a member of the working party updating APM’s Risk Management guide. Heis also a Chartered Building Surveyor with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyorsand sits on the construction procurement panel. Stephen lectures at a number of European

Key Aspects of Project Management 3

universities and has written extensively on the subject of project and risk management. Heis coeditor of Gower’s Handbook of Project Management, 3rd Edition. He received his doctoratein Project Management from The University of Reading.

Erik Larson

Erik Larson is professor and chair of the management, marketing, and international businessdepartment at the College of Business, Oregon State University. He teaches executive, grad-uate, and undergraduate courses on project management and leadership. His research andconsulting activities focus on project management. He has published numerous articles onmatrix management, product development, and project partnering. He is coauthor of apopular textbook, Project Management: The Managerial Process, 2nd Edition, as well as a profes-sional book, Project Management: The Complete Guide for Every Manager. He has been a memberof the Portland, Oregon chapter of the Project Management Institute since 1984. In 1995he worked as a Fulbright scholar with faculty at the Krakow Academy of Economics onmodernizing Polish business education. He received a BA in psychology from ClaremontMcKenna College and a PhD in Management from State University of New York at Buffalo.

Dennis P. Slevin

Dennis P. Slevin is Professor of Business Administration at the Katz Graduate School ofBusiness, University of Pittsburgh. He received his education in a variety of university set-tings, starting with a BA in Mathematics at St. Vincent College and continuing with a BSin Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MS in Industrial Administration atCarnegie Mellon University, and a PhD in Business Administration at Stanford Universityin 1969. Dr. Slevin’s research interests focus on entrepreneurship, project management, andcorporate governance. He has coauthored the Total Competitiveness Audit and the Project Im-plementation Profile; each instrument proposes a conceptual model and a diagnostic tool. Hehas published widely in a variety of professional journals, including Administrative Science Quar-terly, Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Sloan Management Review, Project Man-agement Journal, and numerous other journals and proceedings. His book The Whole Manager:How to Increase Your Professional and Personal Effectiveness, New York: AMACOM, 1989 (paper-back, 1991), provides concrete tools for use by practicing managers. He was cochair of PMIResearch Conference 2000, Paris. This conference gathered project management research-ers from around the world and resulted in the book The Frontiers of Project Management Research,PMI 2002, of which he is coeditor. He was cochair of PMI Research Conference 2002,Seattle, July 2002. Since 1972, he has also been president of Innodyne, Inc., a managementconsulting firm specializing in the design and implementation of specially targeted manage-ment development programs. He has worked with numerous companies and organizations,such as PPG Industries, General Electric, Alcoa, Westinghouse, GKN plc, IBM, and manyother large and small firms.

Jeffrey Pinto

Dr. Jeffrey K. Pinto is the Samuel A. and Elizabeth B. Breene Professor of Management inthe Sam and Irene Black School of Business at Penn State Erie. His major research focus

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has been in the areas of project management, the implementation of new technologies, andthe diffusion of innovations in organizations. Professor Pinto is the author or editor of 17books and over 120 scientific papers that have appeared in a variety of academic andpractitioner journals, books, conference proceedings, and technical reports. Dr. Pinto’s workhas been translated into French, Dutch, German, Finnish, Russian, and Spanish, amongother languages. He is also a frequent presenter at national and international conferencesand has served as keynote speaker and as a member of organizing committees for a numberof international conferences. Dr. Pinto served as Editor of the Project Management Journal from1990 to 1996 and is a two-time recipient of the Project Management Institute’s DistinguishedContribution Award. He has consulted widely with a number of firms, both domestic andinternational, on a variety of topics, including project management, new product develop-ment, information system implementation, organization development, leadership, and con-flict resolution. A recent book, Building Customer-Based Project Organizations, was published in2001 by Wiley. He is also the codeveloper of SimProject, a project management simulationfor classroom instruction.