Project Management ToolBox: Tools and Techniques for the Practicing Project Manager

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Project Management Toolboxes per Project Family

As discussed in Chapter 16, some organizations favor customization of the PM toolbox by project family. This is the case when the organizations have a stream of projects featuring both mature and novel technologies, and project size is not considered an issue. Also, when projects are dominated by a strong industry or professional culture, this customization is a valid option. Here, we offer examples of PM toolboxes for the following families:

• Software development project family
• New product development project family
• Manufacturing project family

Because these families have a strong technological emphasis, we added technical deliverables to the PM tools (managerial deliverables) to create the complete PM toolbox. In this way, you can readily use our examples of the PM toolbox as an adaptable blueprint to create the PM toolbox for the specific family in an organization as a proxy for standardized project management process.

In presenting the toolboxes, our goals are as follows:

• Goal 1: Tier each family toolbox into classes of technical novelty (simple, medium, complex).
• Goal 2: Tier each class's toolbox into more and less important tools.

Goal 1: Tier the Toolbox into Project Classes

The degree of technical novelty in projects is often used as a criterion for project classification. Applying this criterion, you can group the projects into classes of simple, medium, and complex. We used this simple framework to distinguish between ...