The Practitioner's Handbook of Project Performance: Agile, Waterfall and Beyond

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Introduction
Section I: Individuals and interactions
	Chapter 1: Chasing mercury: The emotional and social pillars of high-performing teams
		Emotional intelligence
		What is EI?
		What EI is not
		Why EI matters in the workplace
		The importance of EI for project resources
		The role of EI in a larger project management competency framework
		Important mediating factors
		Essential project features
		Team-based skills: Emotional management and awareness
		How can team members develop their own EI?
	Chapter 2: Values as the basis for successful teams: A Scrum perspective and primer
		Introduction
		Value
		The project
		Agile methods
		Project performance defined
		Performance indicators
		Measuring and predicting project performance?
		Achieving performance
		Values and practice
		A recipe for project success
		An overview of Scrum
		Pillars in practice
		Sprint Retrospectives
		Self-organizing teams
		Inspecting and adapting – The right way
		Summary of the recipe
		Pitfalls and challenges
		Preventing backsliding
		Benefits
		Is Scrum right for me?
		Odds and ends
		Conclusion
	Chapter 3: The power of empowering others: Coaching as a leadership model for high-performing teams
		Introduction
		Coaching in a project environment
		The impact of coaching on project performance
		The psychology of successful teams
		Diminishers and multipliers
		Coaching as a leadership style
		Mentoring is different from coaching
		A good coach listens and asks open questions
		Identifying opportunities to coach the team
		The GROW model as a framework
		Options – Brainstorm options for moving forward
		Way forward – Establish actions
		How to apply coaching
		Potential pitfalls
		Conclusion
	Chapter 4: Coping with the unexpected: Flexibility, resilience and culture
		Introduction
		The unexpected
		Projects and project performance
		High-reliability and resilient projects – First insights
		Improving performance: Successfully managing the unexpected
		Lessons learned: Examining select project cases
		Challenges and pitfalls
		Conclusion
		Acknowledgments
	Chapter 5: Leading without authority
		Remove roadblocks and anti-flow that inhibit the team’s performance
		Successful team equation 
		Get to know each other and build trust
		Promote team autonomy
		Be a human first and a project manager second
Section II: Processes, tools and techniques
	Chapter 6: Performance: A combined project and portfolio perspective
		Case study: The new Ashgabat airport
		What is a project?
		Project vs portfolio management
		What is project performance and how do we measure it?
		What are the root causes of poor project performance?
		What are the warning signs?
		Saving troubled projects
		Conclusion
	Chapter 7: Communications shape reality
		Planning communication strategically
		Getting the most from your communication lead
		Who is your spokesperson?
		In conclusion
	Chapter 8: Knowledge management shapes culture
		Introduction
		Organisational learning
		Lessons learned
		Storytelling
		Systemic Lessons Learned Knowledge model
		Wiring an organisation with knowledge and lessons learned
		Implementing the Syllk model in project organisations
		Conclusion
	Chapter 9: Risk management principles
		Overview
		Measuring project success
	Chapter 10: Risk management practices
		Data and processes needed to reduce risk and increase the probability of success
		Dependencies, structures and correlations of risk
		Representing risk interactions using DSM
		Simulating a risk network in Arena
		A risk-adjusted schedule
		Reducible risk management processes are held in the schedule
		Irreducible risk management processes include use of margin and alternate points of integration
		Development of schedule margin
		Key insertion points for schedule margin
		Next steps to increase the probability of project success
		Uncertainty Quantification
	Chapter 11: Act fast and think fast: Agile schedule performance
		Chapter roadmap
		Target projects
		Schedule performance is the efficiency of value delivery
		Measure Agile schedule performance
		Set schedule performance levels
		Improve Agile schedule performance
		Capturing empirical data
		Assessing results
		Improving performance
		Agile challenges to Earned Schedule
		Agile benefits from Earned Schedule
		Leverage Earned Schedule for Agile projects
		Conclusion
	Chapter 12: Monitoring and controlling: Understanding your project’s status
		Introduction
		Back to basics: Systems, projects and the PMBOK® Guide
		Did you see the gorilla?
		Early warning signals
		Too many reports, use a feedback loop
		To change or not to change?
		Common cause vs special cause variation
		Making no change and the funnel experiment
		Change the right thing and the red bead experiment
		Time to implement the change
		Stuff happens
		Conclusion
	The Project Management Office (PMO)
		Why it’s more important now than ever to consider how PMO supports Project Delivery
	Chapter 13: Managing change: From adoption to completion
	Chapter 14: Securing benefits
	Chapter 15: Beyond the triple constraints: Creating conditions for optimal performance
		Introduction
		1. The triple fallacy of project performance
		2. Project management, management of projects, and management for projects
		Which conditions for optimal project performance?
		Conclusion
Section III: Experience
	Chapter 16: Critical success and failure factors in large-scale complex projects
		16.1 Introduction
		16.2 Methodology
		16.3 Overview of selected publications
		16.4 Results
		16.5 Discussion and recommendations
		16.6 Failure factors
	Chapter 17: Performance and measurement: An interdisciplinary study of public sector projects
		17.1 Introduction
		17.2 Project performance
		17.3 Measuring performance
		17.4 Improving the performance of public sector projects
		17.5 Conclusion: Beyond performance
	Chapter 18: Creating value in infrastructure projects: The Public Value Chain
		The Public Value Chain
		Perspectives on performance
		Developing the Public Value Chain
		Validating the Public Value Chain
		Implications of the Public Value Chain
		Conclusion and discussion
	Chapter 19: Evaluating project performance: A comprehensive approach studying EU structural programs
		19.1 A background and framework
		19.2 Evaluation of project performance
		19.3 An illustrative case – The implementation of regional venture capital fund projects
		19.4 Three Ps in project performance
		19.5 The three Ks in project performance evaluation
		19.6 Serendipities and evaluation for project performance
	Chapter 20: Project performance in the financial sector
		Introduction
		Disclaimer
		So, why a chapter on the financial area? What’s special about projects in the financial area, after all?
		With such a variety of projects, how to measure them in a consistent way?
		What does exist in between Waterfall and Agile in the financial sector?
		How to assess where my project stands?
		Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
		Working software over comprehensive documentation
		Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
		Responding to change over following a plan
		What are the steps to become a high-performance project?
		How to have a smooth transition from the current Waterfall-like environment we live in into a more Agile environment?
Section IV: Responding to change
	Chapter 21: Matching theory to practice in a complex world: A philosophical approach
		Introduction
		Talking about complex project management performance
		Meeting social complexity
		Venturing an epistemological turn
		Balancing progress
		Realising good project governance
	Chapter 22: The future of global program leadership: A sci-fi narrative
		A look back for context
		IPMS and CPE map
		Awakening session
		Norming and Planning session (NaP)
		Collaboration and Reimagining sessions (CaR)
		Retrospective session
		CPE in 2100
	Chapter 23: Mindfulness: Achieving performance in an accelerating technology landscape
	Chapter 24: Continuous Digital and #NoProjects
		It is not 1970 any more
		The Agile menace
		The problem with projects
		Requirements for an alternative
		Continuous digital
		Businesses work this way
		Conclusion
Afterword: What the heck are we studying? Projects, performance, and laws
References and further reading
Author profiles and resources
Index