Rapidly evolving technologies, global business interdependencies, and changes to project management (PM) processes and tools demand that new PM competencies be continuously developed and adequately applied to achieve successful results. Despite the many advances in the PM discipline, significant competency gaps exist within even the most successful companies. This book provides the proven strategic approaches needed to grow and evolve your project managers' competency over time, in step with the needs of your business, and supplies practical examples of competency models and how to deploy them.

Lessons Learned is an important phase in project management. This is when organizations can pave the way for future project success by documenting mistakes so they are not repeated and recording best practices so they are repeated. This book covers the important role a project management office (PMO) plays in promoting lessons learned. Project managers learn how to improve processes by applying lessons learned. The book emphasizes "actionability," or producing a process improvement that can be acted upon by anyone in the PMO or project team.

Solve the number one problem with today's young workforce—the soft skills gap The number one challenge with today's young talent is a problem hiding in plain sight: the ever-widening soft skills gap. Today's new, young workforce has so much to offer—new technical skills, new ideas, new perspective, new energy. Yet too many of them are held back because of their weak soft skills. Soft skills may be harder to define and measure than hard skills, but they are just as critical. People get hired because of their hard skills but get fired because of their soft skills. Setting a good example or simply telling young workers they need to improve isn't enough, nor is scolding them or pointing out their failings in an annual review. However you can teach the missing basics to today's young talent. Based on more than twenty years of research, Bruce Tulgan, renowned expert on the millennial workforce, offers concrete solutions to help managers teach the missing basics of professionalism, critical thinking, and followership—complete with ninety-two step-by-step lesson plans designed to be highly flexible and easy to use. Tulgan's research and proven approach has show that the key to teaching young people the missing soft skills lies in breaking down critical soft skills into their component parts, concentrating on one small component at a time, with the help of a teaching-style manager. Almost all of the exercises can be done in less than an hour within a team meeting or an extended one-on-one. The exercises are easily modified and customized and can be used as take-home exercises for any individual or group, to guide one-on-one discussions with direct-reports and in the classroom as written exercises or group discussions. Managers—and their young employees—will find themselves returning to their favorite exercises over and over again. One exercise at a time, managers will build up the most important soft skills of their new, young talent. These critical soft skills can make the difference between mediocre and good, between good and great, between great and one of a kind.

The narrative about the project management profession is dominated by discussions of “success” and “failure” along with the need to improve the competence of project managers. As a result, the community is engaged in a fruitless search for a combination of tools, techniques and practices that will result in desired outcomes for funders. While the profession has made recent attempts to incorporate environmental and social responsibility, these areas are still framed within the existing discourses of project delivery. The De Gruyter Handbook of Responsible Project Management seeks to rethink project management by integrating contributions from the emerging responsible Management domain. This handbook will explore the nature and extent of project professionals’ responsibility at different levels – individual, team, organizational and societal – along with the implications for education, research and practice. The De Gruyter Handbook of Responsible Project Management offers cutting-edge insights into the field of project management. It is an essential reference for scholars and practitioners.

Introduction to processes and projects as key facilitators of modern life -- Understanding and empowering the program management office (PMO) and its influence on project lessons learned -- What do i do if my PMO can't execute? -- Avoiding disruption of the pmo by "accidental adversaries" -- Identifying and applying lessons learned -- The importance of reflection and changing attitudes in lessons learned -- What is "leverage" and how can project managers use it to their advantage? -- The best time to document project lessons learned -- The actual cost to your PMO for not capturing and sharing project lessons learned -- Applying project lessons learned as a best practice for your organization -- Understanding and using the new project framework -- Recognizing and using different perspectives -- Dilemmas and choices faced by project managers -- Identifying valuable candidates for project lessons learned -- Using the project framework to the benefit of enterprise risk management -- The tremendous impact of role models on project management leadership -- Facilitating a closer connection : lessons learned, risk management and knowledge management -- Using the project framework to facilitate technology development in projects -- Using facilitation and reframing toward project process improvement -- Avoiding the traps where structure influences behavior -- Lessons learned from the application of organizational dynamics to the business continuation and emergency response environment -- The sustainability imperative -- Conclusions -- Summary -- Epilogue -- Glossary -- Appendices -- References -- Index

This innovative volume provides a comprehensive overview of improvisation as a pervasive organizational process, essential in ever-changing business environments. Exploring theories of organizational action as well as contemporary challenges, it highlights improvisation’s rich potential in theory building and practice. The value and relevance of improvisational capabilities and processes in organizations are more apparent than ever: the global pandemic has forced organizations to reinvent themselves and to adapt to dramatic change on a massive scale. This surge in improvised activity starkly illustrates how the capability to improvise is key to organizational resilience: organizations that are able to improvise effectively are better prepared to bounce back and even thrive. From the latest thinking on improvisation in organizations to future avenues for research, this volume demonstrates the rich potential for both theory building and practice and provides a valuable resource for researchers and advanced students in organizational strategy, entrepreneurship, product development, information systems, disaster management, and HRM.

Presents the advances in decision support theory and practice with a focus on bridging the socio-technical gap. This book covers a wide range of topics including: Understanding DM, Design of DSS, Web 2.0 Systems in Decision Support, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, Applications of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, and more.