This book offers a guide on how to prepare business and operational environments to safely receive and effectively utilise systems (i.e., products of projects) to prevent successfully completed systems from failing to add value to their intended environment. It is supplemented with four extended practical exercises to help readers apply the principles to their own large, complex projects and ensure project success. Operational Readiness remains one of the least developed practices of both Project Management (PM) and Systems Engineering (SE). As a result, satisfactorily completed "systems" (e.g., satellites, aircrafts, mine shafts, power plants, road and rail networks, hospitals, and schools), completed on time, on budget, and to specification, are often failing to add value by providing improvements in their intended operational environment. In numerous cases, System Deployment is also accompanied by adverse and detrimental effects on the business and operational environments, and at times on the broader environment (e.g., persistent pollution, negative economic externalities, exacerbation of social ills such as deprivation and crime). In this book, the author discusses both the process and challenges of deploying the product into its intended operational environment and offers guidance to enable organisations to benefit from a holistic framework for Operational Readiness. This forward-thinking book is essential reading for all those involved with managing large projects including project managers, sponsors, and executives. It will also be useful for advanced students of Project Management and Systems Engineering looking to understand and expand their knowledge of Operational Readiness, infrastructure projects, and systems deployment.

Accelerated Strategy Development and Execution The company of today has its supply chains and finances stretched further around the globe than ever before while simultaneously having increasing pressures to drive value across a complicated and fluid set of metrics and deliver innovations, products, and services more quickly and reliably. The competitive advantage belongs to the companies that can quicken their vision-building and strategy-execution efforts—the ones that can identify challenges more swiftly and accelerate their decision making so they are better able to formulate and deploy responses decisively yet with greater agility. To successfully accomplish this, companies will have to prioritize creating a culture of leadership that strengthens communication skills and emphasizes systems thinking by building capacity and capability that cuts across the business smokestacks and permeates the entire organization. In State of Readiness, Joseph F. Paris Jr. shares over thirty years of international business and operations experience and guides C-suite executives and business-operations and -improvement specialists on a path toward operational excellence, the organizational capability and situational awareness that is attained as the enterprise reaches a state of alignment for pursuing its strategies. In doing so, create a corporate culture that is committed to the continuous and deliberate improvement of company performance and the circumstances of those who work there—a precursor to becoming a high-performance organization.

Guidelines for Risk Based Process Safety provides guidelines for industries that manufacture, consume, or handle chemicals, by focusing on new ways to design, correct, or improve process safety management practices. This new framework for thinking about process safety builds upon the original process safety management ideas published in the early 1990s, integrates industry lessons learned over the intervening years, utilizes applicable "total quality" principles (i.e., plan, do, check, act), and organizes it in a way that will be useful to all organizations - even those with relatively lower hazard activities - throughout the life-cycle of a company.

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use

An introduction and practitioners guide to the implementation of Operations Readiness & Assurance, particularly in Oil & Gas Projects. Written by David C. Powell, a time served engineer with 40+ years of experience in Oil & Gas Projects in every type of climate and location worldwide. David has worked in OR&A for more than 12 years for several different major companies. The book describes the history behind the development of Project Management techniques leading to the development of OR&A as a discipline and suggests the best available methods for creating an OR&A capability and implementing the OR&A process on a Project.

Throughout most of American history, U.S. military forces proved unready for the wars that were thrust upon them and suffered costly reverses in early battles. During the Cold War, for the first time, U.S. defense policy tried to maintain high readiness in peacetime. But now, with the Cold War over and defense budgets falling, what will happen to U.S. military forces? Will they revert to a state of unpreparedness or find a new balance? Politicians and military planners alike have found this crucial issue especially difficult to deal with because they have often misunderstood what readiness really means. In this book, security expert Richard Betts surveys problems in developing and measuring combat readiness before, during, and after the Cold War. He analyzes why attempts to maximize it often have counterproductive effects, and how confusions in technical concepts cause political controversy. The book explores conflicts between two objectives that are both vital but work against each other because they compete for resources: operational readiness to fight immediately, and structural readiness—the number of organized units that increase military power, but require time during a crisis to gear up for combat. Betts also discusses the problem brought on by the Cold War and plunging defense budgets: mobilization readiness—the plans and arrangements needed to shorten the time for recreating a large military if it once again becomes necessary. Betts offers new ideas for understanding the dilemmas and tradeoffs that underlie debates on how readiness should be maintained in peacetime, and he explores the strategic consequences of different choices.