There is more than a touch of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' in the way many organizations approach project management and the consequences are all too clear: project methodology inappropriately applied; little or no consideration of complexity or ambiguity; alienation of the stakeholders and a statistically poor record of performance for major business or infrastructure projects. Charles Smith's groundbreaking book Making Sense of Project Realities offers convincing explanations as to why project management theory and practice have become disconnected and describes the kind of complex, human skills that are required to deliver successful projects. The text draws heavily on the experiences of practising project and programme managers from across private and public sector organizations, many of whose stories were shared and analysed during the two-year research network 'Rethinking Project Management', which brought together thought leaders on project management from consultancy, industry and academia. The result is a highly readable, very credible and imaginative exploration of the nature of projects and programmes that will strike a chord with every project practitioner; a book that offers a realistic set of ideas for developing creative and effective project players, who understand the purpose of what they are doing, the context within which they are working, and the people with whom they need to engage. Update: Several MBA Courses use this book and the tutor feedback is encouragingly positive, including: "can be used from day one to change the mindset of the students concerning projects and their management."

This book explores ‘project management’ (PM) from a new perspective. Project management is facing a paradigmatic stalemate. Its major challenge is complexity. Its current paradigmatic foundation in first-order cybernetics has reached its limits. More tools are created and project management is applied to any potential context, expecting better results while doing more of the same. Beyond conventional project management, agile and other project management approaches have emerged as new options to answer the complexity challenge. Yet, the question remains whether new options and more tools in light of the current shortcomings can create enough momentum for project management as a whole to overcome its paradigmatic stalemate and evolve toward new paradigms based on second-order cybernetics. This book will embark on a journey to explore current paradigms in project management and argue why an analysis of discourse practices in project management may be critical to generating new paradigmatic perspectives. The aim of this book is to provide an alternative perspective on projects as discourses and project management as a means to observe and conduct these discourses. Instead of defining what projects and project management are, the approach is to look at what people talk about when doing projects and apply project management. It will arrive at a picture of how discourses about project management are shaped and institutionalised through the sensemaking of individuals and selected communities in their specific project practice and how these discourses shape project management in turn. It is argued that this self-reinforcing circle leads to a certain solidification of project management paradigms which prove insufficient in dealing with project complexity. However, it will also be argued that project practitioners can utilise their self-reflection and self-description of these discourse conventions to obtain more meaningful project conversations and arrive at a unified and systemically integrated understanding of project management. This book will be of particular relevance to those interested in current issues underlying project management. More generally, it will be a valuable resource for researchers of project management, organisational studies and governance.

Drawing heavily on research into the experiences of practising project and programme managers from across private and public sector organizations, this readable, very credible and imaginative exploration of the nature of projects and programmes will strike a chord with every project practitioner. It is a book that offers a realistic set of ideas for developing creative and effective project players, who understand the purpose of what they are doing, the context within which they are working, and the people with whom they need to engage.

The difference between Part I and Part II – Volumes 1 & 2 – of this series, is that in Part I the author showed how what we call reality starts with the inner self whereas Part II describes what, in fact, impacts and modifies the environment or reality and what are the factors behind that dynamics. What impacts and modifies the environment is science. This Volume 2 starts by showing how technology plays an important role in scientific progress. Although the relationship between the two is symbiotic, science can exist without technology but technology desperately needs science. Military technology is an example of how technology can help science advance. Some military inventions end up having civilian use. Science being at the center of society, the book makes the case for the direct impact of such social sciences as politics and economics on the advancement of science. Politics, says the author, influences science because of uncertainty in science, and economics does it thanks to the availability of money to scholars and scientists for their research. On the other hand, government also influences scientific progress through regulations. The book gives cyberspace regulation as an example. Furthermore, by showing how art influences science, the author really argues for the polyfactorial aspect of scientific progress. In that line of thought, he goes on to also prove that factors such as skepticism, curiosity, and the quest for knowledge greatly influence the advancement of science. That, says the author, “is a ninety-degree turn … By ending Part two that way, I wanted to, somehow, link it to Part I, which argues that reality starts from within.”

In this very distinctive book, Images of Projects challenges how we think about projects in the most fundamental way: it rejects outright the idea of a one 'best way' to view all projects and also the idea of following a prescriptive approach. In contrast, Images of Projects seeks to encourage a more pragmatic and reflective approach, based on deliberately seeing projects from multiple perspectives, exploring the insights and implications which flow from these, and crafting appropriate action strategies in complex situations. Based on real examples and the authors' work over the last ten years, Images of Projects presents seven pragmatic images for making sense of the complex realities of projects. Illustrated using various models, these images are presented in ways that allow the reader to reflect upon their own mental models in relation to the different perspectives in this book.

The purpose of Projects as Business Constituents and Guiding Motives is to describe and analyse the roles that projects play in business. The editors, authors and researchers are convinced that projects are of significant importance at virtually every level of society, even though companies are the focus of this book. Projects are not merely conspicuous components of businesses, they in fact signal what businesses are all about. As you will see from some of the contributions to this book, these signals come in different forms and have different effects. Thus the various contributions to this book also mirror a kind of uncertainty as to what this phenomenon that is called project is all about. Rather than trying to define what it `really is', the editors have opted for the alternative, namely to let some of the variation be replicated in the different contributions. One important reason for the variations is that each author wants to stress a different aspect of projectisation. The editors illustrate some of the variations as they appear in the minds of researchers and in the minds of those who work with projects every day. They believe that they do greater justice to the field by taking this stance at this stage in the evolution of project management. The book is structured in four sections. The first section includes four chapters elaborating on various aspects of the roles projects play for shareholders, for management, for the global scene, and for the more or less continuous reorganising efforts that characterise most industries at the present time. The second section deals with how projects fit in with traditional business processes and the challenges that face project management as well as the generic business procedures. The third section brings forward some of the most essential matters when it comes to the future of business organisations. Innovation projects have a completely different character compared to traditional projects, and when entire industries go through thorough transformations, attending to project matters will be part of that change. One of the most often-repeated statements in business is that people matter; in the last section that statement is scrutinised in a projectised environment. This volume has a wide international selection of authors. Eight different nationalities are represented. The collection is relevant to academics in business administration, project management and organisation behaviour. It should also appeal to a significant secondary audience: professionals in project management, business strategy and organisation.

What is reality and how do we make sense of it in everyday life? Why do some realities seem more real than others, and what of seemingly contradictory and multiple realities? This book considers reality as we represent, perceive and experience it. It suggests that the realities we take as ‘real’ are the result of real-time, situated practices that draw on and draw together many things - technologies and objects, people, gestures, meanings and media. Examining these practices illuminates reality (or rather our sense of it) as always ‘virtually real’, that is simplified and artfully produced. This examination also shows us how the sense of reality that we make is nonetheless real in its consequences. Making Sense of Reality offers students and educators a guide to analysing social life. It develops a performance-based perspective (‘doing things with’) that highlights the ever-revised dimension of realities and links this perspective to a focus on object-relations and an ecological model of culture-in-action.