Breakthrough Technology Project Management

If you go search on technology project management you find 140+ titles. Most of these do not address IT issues. This is one of the few that addresses IT projects specifically. It deals with all aspects of setting up, organizing, monitoring, tracking, and implementation. Specific problems and issues are addressed individually including how to avoid the problem, how to deal with the problem, and the impact. The authors have adopted an upbeat tone that stresses collaboration, the use of project templates, and lessons learned. These are key factors for success in IT projects from experience in over 40 major projects over a 15 year period. The book contains many useful guidelines for organizing the team, dealing with team member problems, management reporting, presentations of projects, how to establish the project plan quickly using templates, how to employ collaboration to define and update the work, how to do estimation and contingency planning, and how to address risk. There are chapters on dealing with specific issues. Rather than deal with fuzzy concepts, this book gets down to the nitty-gritty of doing a project. The book addresses how to allocation time between project and regular work--something that other books do not do. In addition, there is an emphasis on multiple rather single projects. In the world of IT there are very few instances where you deal with just one project. There are many interrelated projects. This is a well written, complete and innovative project management book. It is no wonder that it has been widely adopted.

This book promotes the "how" not the "what" that you see in so many other PM books. I have read several other books over the past few months (Lewis', Keough's, etc.) They were helpful; however, Lientz & Rea's book was invaluable throughout our annual corporate planning process. It included helpful technology & business trending information, project management maturity within the organization, a structured approach for how to develop a project concept and getting it through management approval, what skills to look for in effective PMs, and much more. The most important information in the book, however, is the authors' understanding of inter- and intra-project dependencies within an organization. I was able to create a very good four-quarter systems' program plan based upon my learnings from this book. If you already have a good grasp of basic PM concepts and theory, but want more assistance with the "how's" or useful "best known methods," this book is for you. Please note that I am using the 1999 edition.

We do contract programming for maintenance and development for over 600 customers in North America and Europe with a staff of over 300 in various locations around Mumbai. There had been many problems in project tracking and estimation in the past. For over a year we have used this book as a guide for project management. The methods in this book are different from traditional project management and really work. We used the template approach to create templates for over 20 project types in client-server, data warehousing, COBOL maintenance, Internet, and e-commerce. We have since expanded this to 34. The templates have provided a degree of standardization that we were not able to achieve before. The collaborative method in the book has been a key factor to greater programmer participation and estimation. Improved budgeting has resulted as well. Overtime we have refined the template detail three times. We now prepare proposals with greater accuracy. We also perform weekly resource allocation and reporting following the guidelines in the book. The book contains specific guidelines for various types of projects which we have used and expanded upon. Per the suggetion in the book we have also established a data base for experience. This has increased productivity. We have done the same with issues. Issues are associated with tasks in the project plans. This has provided excellent management of risk. We have also used another of the author's books, On Time Technology Implementation. It also provides excellent guidelines for both development and maintenance.

This book is quite different from standard project management books. It addresses multiple projects as well as associating risk in tasks with issues related to projects. Our firm in Malaysia adopted the approach in the book. We first retrofitted over 50 project plans into templates with a standard resource list. We then defined issues for the projects. We uncovered on our own about 75 issues. Then we matched up the issues with those in the book. We found that another 35 issues applied to the projects. So far, we have constructed a data base of about 225 issues. We have now about 55 templates. We have found that the approach reduces time in doing scheduling. We are doing assignment of staff through the management of multiple projects. Overall, we have found the method to be effective. It might be useful for the authors to add more issues and guidelines as these are very helpful.

I am a senior IT manager at a large midwestern insurance company. We recently completed all of our Year 2000 work and testing. We have over 70 programmmers and over 35 major systems. Each of these had to be reviewed and then modified. The challenge was how to manage the people working on Year 2000 maintenance as well as new development work. We started in 1996 with planning. A manager obtained this book in 1998. We had had many frustrating months trying to work out managing the programmers time across all of this work. The details of the book on multiple projects was very timely for us. We have employed it since we first started using the book at the end of 1998. The book identifies how to allocate staff time across multiple projects provided that these are set-up through the use of common rules using the project management software. We use Microsoft Project, Version 98, in a shared user environment so that the standardization mentioned in the book was followed. Another idea in the book is the process plan. The writers should go into this more. We developed our own model for key insurance processes as the Year 2000 work wound down. At the peak work, we had over 150 users working with Microsoft Project files.