Book 1 - Project Management: Achieving Competitive Advantage Second Edition by Jeffrey K. Pinto, 2010
Table of Contents
The contents of this book are set out in fourteen chapters as follows:
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1. |
Introduction: Why Project Management? |
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2. |
The Organizational Context: Strategy, Structure, and Culture |
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3. |
Project Selection and Portfolio Management |
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4. |
Leadership and the Project Manager |
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5. |
Scope Management |
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6. |
Project Team Building, Conflict, and Negotiation |
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7. |
Risk Management |
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8. |
Cost Estimation and Budgeting |
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9. |
Project Scheduling: Networks, Duration Estimation, and Critical Path |
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10. |
Project Scheduling: Lagging, Crashing, and Activity Networks |
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11. |
Critical Chain Project Scheduling |
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12. |
Resource Management |
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13. |
Evaluation and Control |
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14. |
Project Closeout and Termination |
This book has 460 pages. Each chapter starts with a Chapter Outline, a list of Chapter Objectives, a Profile of an actual project, followed by the Chapters Introduction. Further, each chapter concludes with a Summary of the chapter's coverage, Key Terms introduced, Discussion Questions, further Case Studies, Internet exercises and Foot Note references used in the preceding chapter. The copious text is supported by ample illustrations, figures, tables, charts and diagrams. The book also includes MS Project exercises where relevant and sample PMP type multiple-choice certification exam questions.
We were very glad to see that this book includes an extensive Glossary of an estimated 350 project management-specific terms. These are preceded by a list of Common Acronyms that appear in the text. But of particular interest is the author's introduction to the Glossary describing the reasoning for the Inclusions and Exclusions. The author's reasoning is briefly paraphrased as follows.[4]
"This glossary includes terms that are: Unique or nearly unique to project management. Not unique to project management, but used differently from common usage. This glossary does not include: Application area-specific terms, terms used in project management that do not differ in any material way from common usage, compound terms whose meaning is clear from the combined meanings of the component parts, and variants when the meaning of the variant is clear from the base term.
As a result of the foregoing, this glossary includes:
- A preponderance of terms related to Project Scope Management, Project Time Management, and Project Risk Management, since many of these terms are unique or nearly unique to project management.
- Many terms from Project Quality Management, since these terms are used more narrowly compared to common usage.
- Relatively few terms from Project Human Resource Management and Project Communications Management since their meanings are similar to common usage.
- Relatively few terms related to Project Cost Management, Project Integration Management, and Project Procurement Management since many of these terms have narrow meanings that are unique to a particular application area."
We cannot help observing that it would be nice to see other authors adopt such a professional approach.
4. Ibid, p439
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Introduction
