Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

CHAPTER 12

Extreme Project Management

Clearly no group can as an entity create ideas. Only individuals can do this. A group of individuals may, however, stimulate one another in the creation of ideas.

— Estill I. Green, former vice president of Bell Telephone Laboratories

CHAPTER LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

• Know when to use Extreme Project Management (xPM) or Emertxe Project Management (MPx)
• Use and adapt the Extreme PMLC model
• Explain the benefits and use of the INSPIRE Extreme PMLC model
• Anticipate and resolve the potential problems of using an Extreme PMLC model

In this chapter, you learn at a very detailed level the kinds of projects that lend themselves to Extreme xPM PMLC models. The vast majority of these are research and development (R&D) projects. For projects in Quadrant 3, the goal is a best-guess and usually reflects the proposer's idea of an ideal end state that the project should attain. Two different project management life cycle (PMLC) models are discussed in this chapter. I don't intend to be flippant about this, but the first model, xPM, is a Quadrant 3 model for projects that have a goal in search of a solution. The second model, MPx, is a Quadrant 4 model for projects that have a solution in search of a goal. Don't worry — I haven't lost my mind. See Chapter 2 for a refresher on the four quadrants.