好书推荐之PM Nation
Project ManagementNation: Tools, Techniques,
and Goals for the New
and Practicing IT Project
Manager
by Jason Charvat
ISBN: 0471139262
Guides every project manager in
responding to challenges promptly,
with certainty and expertise.
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Table of Contents
Project Management Nation—Tools, Techniques, and Goals for the New and
Practicing IT Project manager
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1 - Understanding Project Strategy
Chapter 2 - Becoming an IT Project Manager
Chapter 3 - Project Concepts
Chapter 4 - The Project Analysis
Chapter 5 - Planning for Success
Chapter 6 - Executing the Project
Chapter 7 - Controlling the Project
Chapter 8 - Implementing the Project
Chapter 9 - Closing the Project
Glossary
Index
List of Figures
List of Tables
Foreword
More people work on IT (information technology) projects than on any
other category of project. In fact, if you were to conduct a statistical
investigation of who is doing what on projects implemented throughout
the world, you would likely find that more people are working on IT
projects than on all other types combined!
Until recently, those of us who have studied project management over
the years have emphasized the universality of project issues encountered
by project workers, regardless of the specific nature of the projects being
undertaken. After all, a schedule is a schedule, whether it has been
created for a construction project, an FDA approval effort, or a software
development undertaking. Thus, it is possible to learn key scheduling
tools without worrying about the specific context in which the schedule
occurs. Similar arguments can be made about budget and resource
allocation tools.
Without question, it is remarkable how the experiences of people working
on different types of projects are so similar. When construction project
managers get together with software project managers, they find that
they have many common experiences to share. For example, to the
extent that both groups use borrowed resources (called matrix
management), they face the common situation where project managers
do not control the resources with which they must work. And they both
operate in environments where there is a tendency for project scope to
grow as the project is carried out (called scope creep).
With the onset of the new millennium, we have begun to turn our
attention to the special circumstances governing project work in different
business areas. In particular, we now recognize that knowledge-based
projects face a different set of challenges than the challenges that
traditional projects in the construction and defense industries encounter.
For example, knowledge-based projects are heavily oriented toward
dealing with intangibles. Knowledge itself is ephemeral and ever-changing.
Because knowledge is abstract, it is hard to capture and articulate
customer needs and to convert these into concrete requirements. These
are the types of issues that workers on knowledge-based projects must
contend with day by day.
In Project Management Nation, Jason P. Charvat deals explicitly with the
challenges faced by project professionals working on IT projects. He
begins by recognizing that the key players on IT projects are different
from those encountered on other types of projects. For IT projects to
succeed, for example, it is important to have them supported by senior
level project sponsors. IT projects without powerful and attentive
sponsors are projects that are likely to encounter a host of difficulties.
Also, because IT projects are concerned with converting business needs
into technical solutions, project teams must be comprised of a wide range
of players reflecting both the business and technical dimensions of the
project effort.
Charvat also recognizes that IT projects must conform to the system
development life cycle (SDLC). SDLCs have emerged over the years as
ways to handle the inherent complexity of knowledge-based systems.
They are the engines that drive the project, and a key challenge of IT
project managers is to plan projects that operate in harmony with the
SDLC. Throughout his book, Charvat discusses project management in
the SDLC context.
Charvat also acknowledges that conventional project management
practice has a significant role to play in IT project management. In the
second half of the book, where he discusses project planning, control,
and closure, he reviews standard project management techniques in the
areas of scheduling and configuration control. But even here, he puts an
IT spin on the material, as when he highlights the special role of testing
in software development.
This book serves a bridging function, where best-practice IT management
and conventional project management merge. By addressing the special
issues associated with IT projects, it offers IT project managers pertinent
insights that they would not encounter in the standard project
management literature.
J. Davidson Frame, PhD
Dean, University of Management and Technology
Arlington, VA USA
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