E-grāmata: Practitioner's Handbook of Project Performance: Agile, Waterfall and Beyond

If there’s one thing we can all agree on it’s that project performance can improve. We can deliver more value. We can deliver faster, more efficiently. We can deliver higher quality, more innovation, with happier teammates and more delighted stakeholders. We can do our jobs, as managers and leaders, more effortlessly. There’s always room for improvement. This is the reference text for project performance.

Project management methodologies recognize the importance of prescribing improvement. Continual improvement is baked into nearly every approach, from Agile to Waterfall and everything in between. Academics have found fertile ground in better understanding project performance. Across disciplines, from engineering and economics to sociology and psychology, researchers push the boundaries of knowledge to find ways to improve performance. As practitioners, we are well aware of opportunities to improve our projects and the imperative our leadership places on doing better.

The Practitioner's Handbook of Project Performance is a definitive reference of collective knowledge on project performance. It draws on the world’s leading experts on project performance: thought leaders, the people that write the methodologies, academics and practitioners, from many different industries. It crosses methodologies including Agile, Waterfall and everything in between. It brings together voices whose approach is based on metrics and disciplined planning such as Earned Value Management and Velocity Tracking, along with those who focus on people, stakeholders and the sociological aspects of project performance. We believe there is much to learn from all these experts.

To facilitate a common framework for organizing these experts, we’ve divided the Handbook into four parts. The first part, Defining Project Performance, asks the question "What is project performance?" It sets the stage for thinking about performance in general. The second part, Measuring and Predicting Project Performance, provides metrics based tools for understanding our projects’ performance and forecasting future performance. It includes Earned Value Management and its evolutions, Agile metrics, Agile + EVM hybrid approaches and non-traditional metrics. The third part, Improving Performance, offers day to day tools along with general insights into how we can improve project performance. It includes metrics based prescriptions and people oriented guidelines for managing and improving our projects. The fourth and final part, Lessons Learned, contains stories from the field. It is a rich well of knowledge from people who have been there, tried that and gained the wisdom of experience.