October 2011
Intermediate to advanced
816 pages
23h 9m
English
Content preview from Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition
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Understanding the Fundamentals of Project Management
The Project Management Institute (PMI) formally defines project management as follows: “The application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.”1
Even though that definition is open to broad interpretation I have no problem with it because I prefer to keep things simple and intuitive and that is what PMI has done. For our purposes here I'm going to add a little more content than the PMI definition offers. The definition that I offer shortly in this chapter is designed to be a working definition.
Project management is a set of tools, templates, and processes designed to answer the following six questions:
- What business situation is being addressed by this project?
- What do you need to do?
- What will you do?
- How will you do it?
- How will you know you did it?
- How well did you do?
Let's quickly look at the answers to these questions.
What Business Situation Is Being Addressed by This Project?
The business situation is either a problem that needs a solution or an untapped opportunity. If it is a problem, the solution may be clearly defined and the delivery of that solution will be rather straightforward. If the solution is not completely known, then the project-management approach must iteratively embrace the learning and discovery of that solution. Obviously, these will ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.