The growing complexity of projects today, as well as the uncertainty inherent in innovative projects, is making obsolete traditional project management practices and procedures, which are based on the notion that much about a project is known at its start. The current high level of change and complexity confronting organizational leaders and managers requires a new approach to projects so they can be managed flexibly to embrace and exploit change. What once used to be considered extreme uncertainty is now the norm, and managing planned projects is being replaced by managing projects as they evolve. Successfully managing projects in extreme situations, such as polar and military expeditions, shows how to manage successfully projects in today’s turbulent environment. Executed under the harshest and most unpredictable conditions, these projects are great sources for learning about how to manage unexpected and unforeseen situations as they occur. This book presents multiple case studies of managing extreme events as they happened during polar, mountain climbing, military, and rescue expeditions. A boat accident in the Artic is a lesson on how an effective project manager must be ambidextrous: on one hand able to follow plans and on the other hand able to abandon those plans when disaster strikes and improvise new ones in response. Polar expeditions also illustrate how a team can use "weak links" to go beyond its usual information network to acquire strategic information. Fire and rescues operations illustrate how one team member’s knowledge can be transferred to the entire team. Military operations provide case material on how teams coordinate and make use of both individual and collective competencies. This groundbreaking work pushes the definitions of a project and project management to reveal new insight that benefits researchers, academics, and the practitioners managing projects in today’s challenging and uncertain times.

In response to the rise of various forms of the extreme in economies, organizations and societies (such as disruptive innovation, climate emergency, financial crisis, high-risk sport, etc.), an ambitious 21st century program sets the agenda of management sciences around the unknown, disruption, uncertainty and risk. Management of Extreme Situations presents the research results from the conference organized at the Cerisy-la-Salle International Cultural Center, France, in 2016. It testifies to the existence of an international community that brings together, around management sciences, various disciplines studying the management concept of extreme situations. Through the analysis of varied contexts (polar and mountain expeditions, fire rescue services, exploration projects in the military field, creative industries, etc.), this book offers an initial grammar of the extreme. It presents a heuristic for the management of these situations – particularly in terms of sensemaking, ambidexterity and knowledge expansion.

Today’s new breed, eXtreme projects are different. They feature high speed, high change, high complexity, high risk, and high stress. While traditional projects follow the classic model of ready, aim, fire, eXtreme project managers succeed by shooting the gun and then redirecting the bullet while not loosing sight of their moving target. eXtreme Project Management provides a practical guide for leaders working under high risk and high pressure while producing the desired bottom-line results. Based on Doug DeCarlo’s extensive experience in working with more than 250 project teams, his eXtreme project management model is built around an integrated set of principles, values, skills, tools, and practices proven to consistently work under conditions of rapid change and uncertainty. eXtreme project management is based on the premise that you don’t manage the unknown the same way you manage the known. It’s a people-centric approach to high performance that makes quality of life a fundamental part of the project venture.

Expert guidance on ensuring project success—the latest edition! Many projects fail to deliver on time and within budget, and often-poor project management is to blame. If you're a project manager, the newest edition of this expert and top-selling book will help you avoid the pitfalls and manage projects successfully. Covering the major project management techniques including Traditional (Linear and Incremental), Agile (Iterative and Adaptive), and Extreme, this book lays out a comprehensive overview of all of the best-of-breed project management approaches and tools today. You'll learn how to use these approaches effectively to achieve better outcomes. Fresh topics in this new edition include critical chain project management, using the Requirements Management Lifecycle as a key driver, career and professional development for project managers, and more. This book is packed with step-by-step instruction and practical case studies, and a companion web site offers additional exercises and solutions. Gives new or veteran project managers a comprehensive overview of the best-of-breed project management approaches and tools today Shows readers, through step-by-step instruction and practical case studies, how to use these tools effectively Updated new edition adds new material on career and professional development for project managers, critical chain project management, and more If you're seeking to improve your professional project management skills, the latest edition of this popular, successful, and in-depth book is the place to start. Visit http://wysockiepm.com/ for support materials and to connect with the author.

Over the past three decades, translation has evolved from a profession practiced largely by individuals to a cottage industry model and finally to a formally recognized industrial sector that is project-based, heavily outsourced and that encompasses a wide range of services in addition to translation. As projects have grown in size, scope and complexity, and as project teams have become increasingly distributed across geographies, time zones, languages and cultures, formalized project management has emerged as both a business requirement and a critical success factor for language service providers. In recognition of these developments, this volume examines the application of project management concepts, tools and techniques to translation and localization projects. The contributors are seasoned practitioners and scholars who offer insights into the central role of project management in the language industry today and discuss best-practice approaches to the adaptation of generic project management knowledge, skills, tools and techniques for translation and localization projects.

Most project managers would agree that every project is unique. But not all project managers would agree that the best way to manage a unique project is unique. Many still cling to the old practice of having a methodology that is applied to all projects. "One size fits all" is still in common use, and this approach has proven to lead to project failure. Flexibility, situational intelligence, and creativity are essential to deliver project success. The need to recognize and master ever-changing requirements and environmental conditions is a tough challenge for professional project managers. The same practices that led to success yesterday may cause failure today. Selecting favorable responses to a given situation is often the most critical factor of the dynamics of success and failure. This book is designed to help project professionals assess a situation, predict the appropriate approach, methodology and achieving styles, and then apply them in a situational fashion. To guide project managers in selecting the appropriate responses, Situational Project Management (SitPM) shows how to assess a given project, determine its unique characteristics, and select the appropriate methods to complete the project. With this book, projects managers can use SitPM to develop profiles of their projects on the basis of the projects’ physical characteristics, the project teams’ behavioral characteristics, the enterprise environment, and the market environments receiving project deliverables. These profiles help project managers to determine the appropriate project life cycle approach and leadership style. The book also explores various ways to engage stakeholders on the basis of a project’s SitPM profile. The book’s author, Oliver F. Lehmann, has developed a set of templates to apply SitPM in practice. It can be downloaded from www.oliverlehmann.com/SitPM/Templates.zip.

Since project management offices began to appear in organizations over the last decade, project management practitioners and their organizations have been asking how to structure project management offices (PMOs) and what functions to assign them. In The Project Management Office (PMO): A Quest For Understanding, authors Brian Hobbs and Monique Aubry address these questions, providing a look at how PMOs exist today, and some clues about how and why they're changing. Of particular interest to practitioners, the authors address the roles that PMOs play in organizations, which provides valuable insights for better creating, structuring and governing PMOs. When designing a PMO, an organization has a variety of choices regarding the PMO's structure and role assignment. By providing a way to define PMOs by type, this research explores how to set up and define a PMO, depending upon the specific type of PMO The authors discuss the many bases for the types of PMOs, including structural characteristics and functions, and how these types affect the PMO's role in the organization.