ABSTRACT

Modern project management had its genesis in the field of operations research in the late 1940s, but today it is a much more diverse subject. It has evolved and developed a much wider range of methods, techniques, and skills that the project manager can draw upon.

 

Not all these skills are relevant to every project, but an assortment of them will be relevant to most. This book aims to describe for students, researchers and managers the full range of skills that project managers can use to develop their methodologies.The authors group the skills into nine perspectives, representing nine schools of project management research and theory. By attaching a metaphor to each of these perspectives, students, researchers and managers are better able to understand each approach and decide whether it is best suited to the development of a strategy for managing their project.

 

Perspectives on Projects builds upon the various theoretical orientations that the field of project management has developed. Featuring several case studies, drawn from a variety of settings, to illustrate how the different schools can provide different perspectives on projects, this book is an ideal text for anyone involved in project management.

part |2 pages

PART I The nine perspectives

chapter 2|29 pages

Optimization: The project as a machine

chapter 3|19 pages

Modeling: The project as a mirror

chapter 4|24 pages

Success: The project as an objective

chapter 5|43 pages

Governance: The project as a legal entity

chapter 6|31 pages

Behavior: The project as a social system

chapter 7|20 pages

Marketing: The project as a billboard

chapter 8|25 pages

Process: The project as an algorithm

chapter 9|21 pages

Decision: The project as a computer

chapter 10|20 pages

Contingency: The project as a chameleon

part |2 pages

PART II The three case studies

chapter 11|5 pages

Using the nine perspectives

chapter 13|27 pages

The LAS story: Learning from failure