Why this book about holistic (or total) project management?
Projects are executed by people and rather often on behalf of people (directly or indirectly), especially ICT projects.
A project manager not only needs “hard” skills such as planning a project and performing risk management but also needs a lot of “soft” skills and experience. In this context, “soft” skills mainly focus on how to deal with people.
In case you can’t deal with people, in a variety of circumstances, you can’t be a project manager in my view. Nowadays people working on projects could be in different physical places due to, for instance, outsourcing of work to other countries. This makes project management even more complex and challenging compared to 20 years ago.
So holistic in this context means that a lot of attention is being paid to the human aspects of projects. Finishing a project within the allotted time/budget and then realizing that the customers, for instance, are not happy/satisfied, don’t want to work with you anymore, or have burn-outs is, in my perspective, not a successful project.
A project is successful according to me when everybody (100% is a challenge) is happy and the attitude is “WE have done this together” and “we would like to work with you again.”
Project management not only overlaps with line management but also has a number of differences. The two disciplines need to work together as well in order to achieve the required results. The main difference is that a project is temporarily composed of people with different disciplines (different line managers). Line managers (normally) take care of their staff continuously. Furthermore, line managers are responsible for the personal development of their staff, including performance reviews. The project manager provides input for these performance reviews as well.
This book not only covers the “normal” subjects of project management such as financial management and risk management during the project phases but also contains special chapters about psychology, personal development, and presentations.
It is not my intention to make a psychologist of a project manager but first of all to create awareness of the psychological side of project management in dealing with people.
My intention is to give practical and directly usable information based on my personal experience I gained during 16 years as a certified senior project manager at IBM Global Services based in the Netherlands.
How often is the impact of a project thought about in a broad sense? This book also covers this important subject by looking at the impact on persons as well as the environment.
For further information, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Website: www.lvdhppcp.com