Creating an Environment for Successful Projects: The Quest to Manage Project Management

One of the better books on project management, the focus is not so much on specific best practices for project managers to implement on their own within their teams, but how upper management can create an environment that is conducive to project success. This book is exceptionally good at helping to understand how management causes organizational perversity - mucking things up by applying departmental best practices that are totally inappropriate and bad practices for project teams. Great insights into how this happens without upper managers being aware they are doing the opposite of what they intend. Could be used by a Project Office to convince upper management that they might be the main problem that keeps other best practices from being effective. It also highlights those areas where you can get the most leverage, most out of your efforts to get an organization to improve its overall project management effectiveness.Amazing how a book written in 1997 seems like it was written for current times.

If you want to understand the underpinnings of what makes projects work or not ... this book is a "must read". It is full of the kind of plain yet profound logic that my grandmother used to pass on to me when I was child. It just made so much practical sense ... .

This book was reviewed in "The Journal of Product Innovation Management" May 1998, an international publication of the Product Development & Management Association (PDMA):A book which discusses how companies can effectively create a healthier and more nurturing environment for product development, based on companies like Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Raychem and others. "As the title implies, this book is about managing project management, not about managing projects - an important concept... Its purpose is to get upper management to understand how and why to develop project management as an organizational competency... Relevant across industries from high tech to low, from product to service, and from consumer to industrial or business-to-business... Its key strengths are: 1) its comprehensive treatment of key issues from the role of strategic direction across the project portfolio to the need for cultivating project management learning; 2) its practical recommendations for change; and 3) its easy-to-read examples... The book is well organized with an overview chapter that includes a call to action and an overview of the remaining chapters. The next seven chapters go on to describe each of the elements of creating an environment for success projects. Laid out as pieces of a complete puzzle to signal their importance as a system" (Mark Deck, Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath, May 1998)

Most PM books focus on those things the PM is supposed to control: cost, schedule performance, quality. This book posits that there are many factors OUTSIDE of the project manager's control that prevent project success. The PM spends more time dealing with external issues than managing the project team. Managers of PMs must "create an environment for successful projects", by essentially identifying and eliminating environmental barriers to project success, so the PM can focus on managing the project and the project team. Intended for managers of a manager of PMs. Also a good book if you're a PM consultant or a manager of a project-oriented department containing several PMs and project teams. My only real criticism is that there's a fair bit of consultant-speak psychobabble in the book. In spite of that, there's enough solid info in the book to make it a worthwhile read. Recommended.

This book, by 2 authors who are very knowledgeable and well respected, is unique. It is the only book that I have been able to find on the subject of project management for people who are managers of project managers. It contains enough (but not too much) material to describe what project management is---and what it is not. If upper managers read the book and pay attention to its contents by implementing some of its recommendations the lives of people managing projects in their organizations are likely to become more fulfilling, and project management will be of more value to the parent organization. The book also provides some insight into one of the US's more successful corporations, Hewlett-Packard, from which the authors draw many of their examples. A job well done!