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20081212 Friday December 12, 2008

[ Work ] Is Project Management Dead?


The PMBOK book comes to you courtesy of Project Management Institute.
It is considered a standard for project management.
Chapters 1 to 3 are "must" reads. The remaining chapters are further, very useful elaborations of the material in these earlier chapters.
When you read chapters 1 to 3, think of what it would mean to apply the concepts in some project you're facing: Perhaps, you're organizing a large conference, a wedding, or the construction of the next space shuttle.
See which concepts are applicable where.
I used the book, along with cases form the real world, to teach a semester-long graduate course in project management at NPU last summer.

Far from it.

Projects are about unique objectives attained within defined duration.

They are inherently different from operational work.

By the very nature of how we operate as human beings, any cooperative activity involving more than a two or three interactions per person contains within it the seeds of error, missteps and failures. (This may have to do with the common size of family units in some of our societies.)

The whole practice of project management involves instituting processes that meet in anticipation of these errors and failures, handle and check them when they occur and make the necessary adjustments in order to digest the uncertainties that future brings.

If future could be perfectly predicted, there would be no need for project management. If groups could cooperate with a guarantee that no failure or shortcomings would occur on the way to the objective, there would be no need for project management.

2008-12-12 15:47:12.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

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