Managing Projects as Investments: Earned Value to Business Value (Systems Innovation Book Series)

Product Description

Every project is an investment; however, traditional project management methodologies do not support assessment of the business value that enables senior management to maximize decision making. The next evolution in project management, therefore, will be to manage projects as investments. Managing Projects as Investments: Earned Value to Business Value provides tools and metrics to enable planning, measuring, evaluating, and optimizing projects.
This book shifts the paradigm. It builds on traditional scope-cost-schedule tools, adding a critical new focus on the expected value of projects and programs. The enhancements in processes and metrics allow senior management and PMOs to guide the entire organization on the basis of business benefits, and to ensure that decisions ranging from project selection to resource assignment facilitate those goals. The author shows how framing projects as investments enables significant improvement in project performance. He provides metrics that allow you and your team to track and maximize performance based on ROI.
Demonstrating the importance of recognizing an enabler project in a program, and why its value and cost of time are so great, the book provides the tools to determine right-sized staffing levels for project-driven organizations. It includes a comprehensive but easy-to-understand explanation of both basic and advanced earned value metrics, their shortcomings, and how they can be improved and shows you how to optimize contract terms on projects in a way that can avoid misaligned customer/contractor goals.

Review

“For first time users, this book is a valuable contribution to the project management industry. Simple, clear, concise examples ensure the understanding of the reader. … Good, clear, concise descriptions of the theory certainly make the case for project managers to use the methodology presented. [It] should help prevent cost and time overruns, which too often occur. … very chatty style! The summary points are very useful and time saving.”―Raphael M. Dua, Micro Planning International Asia Pacific Pty. Ltd., Melbourne, Australia
“… easy to follow and clearly explains current project management methods and concepts in order to introduce the, now seemly obvious, benefits of new ones. … an eye opener and a career enhancer. This book challenges the project manager to step out of his comfort zone and to start thinking like a business manager who invests in value. Extremely well written with no fluff, this book should not only be on every project managers and senior managers bookshelf, but well-thumbed and ‘dog eared’ from repeated reading.―Emily Foster, Ten Six Consulting”I am delighted to see an author address project management from this innovative perspective. An investment is the keystone to organizational success. If a project is viewed as such, more resources and efforts will be directed at this, thereby increasing the chances for success. Project management is an investment, not an overhead. This book brings this fact to the forefront.”―Adedeji Badiru, Air Force Institute of Technology”… approachable, clear and thought provoking. Mr. Devaux presents the reader with the tools to improve their project management maturity – tools essential to replacing intuition based decision making with quantifiable and justifiable analysis.”―Bernard Ertl, Vice President, InterPlan Systems”… is very useful to practitioners seeking to expand their understanding on managing projects and project portfolios. The new concepts may help even the experienced project managers. The layout of the author’s rationales in driving towards the implications contained in the chapters should also allow anyone new to project management to follow and to understand the challenges and the best practices in managing projects.”―Kuo-Ting Hung, Suffolk University”In his book Stephen Devaux promotes innovative approach to project management when project management goal is not just meeting tripl