Naked Project Management, The Bare Facts
by Dennis Lock, 2013
Table of Contents
The content of this book is set out in 8 chapters as follows:
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1.
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Projects
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2.
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Getting Ready for the Project
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3.
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Organization
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4.
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Planning and Scheduling
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5.
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Contracts and Commerce
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6.
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Take Control
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7.
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Task Forces for Special Projects
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8.
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Round up
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The book has 112 pages and includes 27 figures. The book does not
have a Glossary of Terms.
In the Email mentioned previously, author Dennis Lock had this to say about
project management books in general:
"I want to put before you another of my beliefs, which is that the project management fraternity (and other project management writers) seem to despise the commercial aspects of projects. Pick up any project management book and you will usually be hard pressed to find anything about purchasing and the supply chain - yet bought materials and services can account for up to 80 per cent of the total project cost.
Look at any book on project risk management, and you will find all about project identification, classification, assessment matrices, risk logs, risk managers and risk mitigation steps. But what about insurance using an underwriter or a broker, which is an important part of risk management. Most construction managers, for example, have to face the daily (or rather nightly) risk of having plant and machinery stolen from the site and that's an insurance issue.
Here's another thing, whilst I am fired up. That is the general confusion between analysis and reporting of progress and costs (including earned value analysis) and actual project management (the taking of decisive action). In my youth I used to be guilty of sitting behind my desk, studying schedules and results, issuing memos and expecting the project to correct itself. I soon learned my lesson."
In our youth we had the vision that we could have our project so well organized that we could sit at our desk with our feet up, while the project ran itself from end to end. Needless to say, it never happened. Instead, we learned another valuable lesson - bosses like to see activity. In their mind, lack of physical activity by an individual suggests someone that is surplus to requirements. Perhaps that is why some project managers have been known to deliberately create crises that they then solve - to justify their existence.
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Introduction
