Total Project Control: A Practitioner's Guide to Managing Projects as Investments, Second Edition (Systems Innovation Book Series) - Hardcover

Devaux, Stephen A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1498706770 ISBN 13: 9781498706773

Publisher: CRC Press, 2015

Synopsis

There is often a deep disconnect between the project team’s goals and those of the organization. Senior management wants "profitable" projects, but is only able to quantify its wishes in terms of the traditional project management elements: schedule and cost. To operate smoothly, the entire organization must be driven by the single goal of project profitability. Total Project Control presents valuable enhancements to the traditional project management approach, introducing new metrics and techniques for assessing the performance and profitability of projects.

Demonstrating how to maximize the business value of a project, this book discusses new profitability-based data metrics, such as expected monetary value (EMV), expected project profit (EPP), Devaux's Index of Project Performance (DIPP), critical path drag, drag cost, and the cost of leveling with unresolved bottlenecks (CLUB). The impact of implementing these metrics can be far reaching. Not only will good management decisions, at both the project and executive levels, be supported by quantitative data, but bad decisions will become harder to justify.

This book shows how to compute and use the new metrics to rightsize staffing levels for projects, programs, and organizations. It also explains what every project manager needs to know about earned value tracking: its uses, abuses, value, distortions, and potential fixes. The book then extends these metrics into techniques for indexing, tracking, progressing, and improving the business value of projects.

See What’s New in the Second Edition:

• Includes new diagrams and new ways of computing critical path drag in complex networks
• Introduces DIPP Performance Index tracking
• Offers new exercises in how to compute critical path drag and drag cost and use them to maximize project value
• Focuses on topics senior management needs to be assured the project team is using to maximize project profitability

About this title

About the Author

Bajan-born Steve Devaux is a project management theorist, consultant, and academic. He developed TPC, an ROI-based approach to project planning and analysis, as well as such new techniques as critical path drag and the value breakdown structure (VBS). He founded Analytic Project Management in 1992 and has consulted to industries ranging from software to aerospace. He has an M. Sc. in project management from Northeastern University and has taught graduate courses at Brandeis University, Suffolk University, and University of West Indies at Barbados.

From the Back Cover

New metrics for assessing the performance and profitability of individual or multiple projects-written by the creator of the Total Project Control method.
"Critical path method needed a shot in the arm and Devaux delivers it in Total Project Control. His new book is an invaluable and much-needed advance in the art and practice of project management. Every project manager (and software developer) should read this book to understand what project management is all about."-Joel Koppelman, President, Primavera Systems, Inc.
"Devaux's Total Project Control introduces a welcome approach for managing dynamic projects from start to finish."-Janet M. Baker, PhD, Chairman and CEO, Dragon Systems, Inc.
"Finally, a major shift from traditional project management theory. Devaux slams through decades of cost/schedule fixation and completes the picture. The value concepts in Total Project Control will launch both the art and the science of project planning into mainstream business thinking."-Chip Drapeau, President and CEO, Project Software & Development, Inc.
"Total Project Control represents a comprehensive approach for orchestrating and evaluating complex projects."-Alan Trefler, CEO, Pegasystems, Inc.
"Total Project Control describes essential new tools for the project management 'power user' that are not found in your favorite project planning software. These tools will prove to be indispensable for the manager who must objectively balance complex multiproject resources."-Robert Virag, Senior Director, Research and Development, Mallinckrodt Inc.
"In Total Project Control Stephen Devaux delivers a major breakthrough-all of the tools and understanding necessary to manage enterprise-wide resources in any project-driven company."-Dr. Priscilla A. Glidden V.P. of Human Resources and Organizational Effectiveness, Abt Associates, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1498706770
• ISBN 13: 9781498706773
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 310