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    HBR Guide to Project Management (HBR Guide Series)
    HBR Guide to Project Management (HBR Guide Series)
    HBR Guide to Project Management (HBR Guide Series)
    Ebook167 pages2 hours

    HBR Guide to Project Management (HBR Guide Series)

    By Harvard Business Review

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    About this ebook

    MEET YOUR GOALS—ON TIME AND ON BUDGET.

    How do you rein in the scope of your project when you’ve got a group of demanding stakeholders breathing down your neck? And map out a schedule everyone can stick to? And motivate team members who have competing demands on their time and attention?

    Whether you’re managing your first project or just tired of improvising, this guide will give you the tools and confidence you need to define smart goals, meet them, and capture lessons learned so future projects go even more smoothly.

    The HBR Guide to Project Management will help you:

  • Build a strong, focused team
  • Break major objectives into manageable tasks
  • Create a schedule that keeps all the moving parts under control
  • Monitor progress toward your goals
  • Manage stakeholders’ expectations
  • Wrap up your project and gauge its success
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarvard Business Review Press
    Release dateJan 8, 2013
    ISBN9781422187319
    HBR Guide to Project Management (HBR Guide Series)
    Author

    Harvard Business Review

    Harvard Business Review es sin lugar a dudas la referencia más influyente en el sector editorial en temas de gestión y desarrollo de personas y de organizaciones. En sus publicaciones participan investigadores de reconocimiento y prestigio internacional, lo que hace que su catálogo incluya una gran cantidad de obras que se han convertido en best-sellers traducidos a múltiples idiomas.

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    Book preview

    HBR Guide to Project Management (HBR Guide Series) - Harvard Business Review

    HBR Guide to

    Project

    Management

    Harvard Business Review Guides

    Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, from the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

    The titles include:

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    HBR Guide to Giving Effective Feedback

    HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter

    HBR Guide to Managing Stress

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    HBR Guide to Project Management

    HBR Guide to

    Project

    Management

    HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS

    Boston, Massachusetts

    Copyright 2012 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation

    All rights reserved

    Printed in the United States of America

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu, or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    HBR’s guide to project management.

    p. cm.

    ISBN 978-1-4221-8729-6 (alk. paper)

    1. Project management. I. Harvard business review. II. Title:

    Guide to project management.

    HD69.P75H394 2013

    658.4'04—dc23

    2012026957

    eBook development by eBook Architects

    What You’ll Learn

    You’ve been asked to lead a project. You appreciate the vote of confidence, but are you panicking because you haven’t a clue where to begin? Do you worry that stakeholders will tug you in a million directions, making it impossible to set clear goals, let alone deliver the goods on time and on budget? How will you know when to stick to your original plan and when to be flexible? And how will you keep all your team members excited about this project—when they have so many other pressures on them?

    This guide will give you the confidence and tools you need to manage projects effectively.

    You’ll get better at:

    Choosing the right team and keeping it humming

    Avoiding scope creep

    Zeroing in on critical tasks and mapping out a logical sequence

    Making heads or tails of Gantt and PERT charts

    Getting disruptive team members on board

    Keeping stakeholders in the loop

    Gauging your project’s success

    Deciding when to cut bait

    Capturing—and using—lessons learned

    Contents

    Overview

    1. The Four Phases of Project Management

    What’s Involved in planning, build-up, Implementation, and closeout—and how these processes overlap

    2. The Cast of Characters

    Who’s who in project management

    Phase 1: PLANNING

    3. A Written Charter

    Your marching orders

    4. Dealing with a Project’s Fuzzy Front End

    You can’t eliminate uncertainty in the early stages of a complex project—but you can manage it.

    BY LOREN GARY

    5. Performing a Project Premortem

    Learn from your project while it’s still alive and well.

    BY GARY KLEIN

    6. Will Project Creep Cost You—or Create Value?

    Set strict limits on scope, but be flexible when major opportunities arise.

    BY LOREN GARY

    Phase 2: BUILD-UP

    7. Setting Priorities Before Starting Your Project

    Three steps for staying on track

    BY RON ASHKENAS

    8. Boost Productivity with Time-Boxing

    Tips for getting your team’s calendars—and yours—under control

    BY MELISSA RAFFONI

    9. Scheduling the Work

    Put the horse before the cart.

    10. HBR Case Study: A Rush to Failure?

    When does speed trump quality?

    BY TOM CROSS

    11. Getting Your Project Off on the Right Foot

    Set your project up for success with a well-planned launch.

    12. The Discipline of Teams

    Mutual accountability leads to astonishing results.

    BY JON R. KATZENBACH AND DOUGLAS K. SMITH

    Phase 3: IMPLEMENTATION

    13. Effective Project Meetings

    Run your meetings well, and infuse your project with energy and direction.

    14. The Adaptive Approach to Project Management

    What to do when your usual decision tools cease to be useful in the face of uncertainty

    15. Why Good Projects Fail Anyway

    The risks that come with big projects—and how to manage them

    BY NADIM F. MATTA AND RONALD N. ASHKENAS

    16. Monitoring and Controlling Your Project

    Don’t be afraid to revise your plan.

    BY RAY SHEEN

    17. Managing People Problems on Your Team

    Make sure people stay on task, pull their weight, work together, and meet quality standards.

    18. The Tools of Cooperation and Change

    What to do when people disagree on goals, how to achieve them, or both

    BY CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN, MATT MARX, AND HOWARD H. STEVENSON

    19. Don’t Throw Good Money (or Time) After Bad

    How to avoid chasing after sunk costs

    BY JIMMY GUTERMAN

    Phase 4: CLOSEOUT

    20. Handing off Authority and Control

    Gauge your success before wrapping things up.

    BY RAY SHEEN

    21. Capturing Lessons Learned

    Four steps to an effective after-action review

    BY RAY SHEEN

    Glossary

    Index

    Overview

    Chapter 1

    The Four Phases of Project Management

    Whether you’re in charge of developing a website, designing a car, moving a department to a new facility, updating an information system, or just about any other project (large or small), you’ll go through the same four phases: planning, build-up, implementation, and closeout. Even though the phases have distinct qualities, they overlap. For example, you’ll typically begin planning with a ballpark budget figure and an estimated completion date. Once you’re in the build-up and implementation phases, you’ll define and begin to execute the details of the project plan. That will give you new information, so you’ll revise your budget and end date—in other words, do more planning—according to your clearer understanding of the big picture.

    Here’s a chart that outlines the activities of each phase, plus the skills and tools you may need for doing the work:

    Planning: How to Map Out a Project

    When people think of project planning, their minds tend to jump immediately to scheduling—but you won’t even get to that part until the build-up phase. Planning is really about defining fundamentals: what problem needs solving, who will be involved, and what will be done.

    Determine the real problem to solve

    Before you begin, take time to pinpoint what issue the project is actually supposed to fix. It’s not always obvious.

    Say the CIO at your company has asked you, an IT manager, to develop a new database and data entry system. You may be eager to jump right into the project to tackle problems you have struggled with firsthand. But will that solve the company’s problem? To increase the project’s chances of success, you must look beyond the symptoms you have observed—We can’t get the data out fast enough and I have to sift through four different reports just to compile an update on my clients’ recent activity— to find the underlying issues the organization is trying to address. Before designing the database, you should ask what type of data is required, what will be done with it, how soon a fix is needed, and so on. If you don’t, you’ll run the risk of wasting time and money by creating a solution that is too simplistic, too complicated, or too late—or one that doesn’t do what users need it to do.

    Identify the stakeholders

    The real problem will become even clearer once you figure out who all your stakeholders are—that is, which functions or people might be affected by the project’s activities or outcomes, who will contribute resources (people, space, time, tools, and money), and who will use and benefit from the project’s output. They will work with you to spell out exactly what success on the project means. Have them sign off on what they expect at the end of the project and what they are willing to contribute to it. And if the stakeholders change midstream, be prepared not only to respond to the new players but also to include all the others in any decision to redirect the project.

    Whether you’re managing a

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