Strategic Project Management Made Simple
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Strategic Project Management Made Simple

Practical Tools for Leaders and Teams

Terry Schmidt
Wiley, 2009
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Have you ever been part of a project that seemed to be an empty exercise in chart maintenance? Terry Schmidt shows you how to avoid that pitfall by designing your project to provide real strategic value to your company. He also provides excellent tools you can use on every project to make sure that its work is meaningful, that your logical design for the project is sound and that you have organized its work in purposeful chunks. Since project management depends on people, Schmidt shows you how to involve your colleagues, team members and stakeholders. He organizes his chapters for clarity and ends them with summaries of the main points. He provides the forms you need, and explains how to adapt and use them. Schmidt illustrates his principles with real-world examples drawn from his long experience consulting with companies and governments. He even throws in some nice humor and a few quite funny cartoons. getAbstract recommends this helpful, thoughtful look at project management. Schmidt goes beyond explaining the right techniques to focus on doing projects in a way that provides strategic value.

Summary

Project Management Is Much More Than Charts

Whether your project is big or small, you can use strategic tools and approaches to manage it effectively.

The most important project management task is to understand exactly what you are trying to do, what success will look like and how you will know you have reached it.

Avoid six common project-planning mistakes:

  1. Having fuzzy objectives – When you begin a project without a clear destination you will end up doing a great deal of unusable work.
  2. Working without context – If you don’t know how your effort fits into a larger picture, you probably are working without the ability to make course corrections.
  3. Using the wrong tools – Use the right tools, not just the easily available tools.
  4. Believing stakeholders don’t matter – No project exists in isolation. Be sure your work has meaning for those who will assess what you produce.
  5. Being too busy to plan – If you don’t take the time to plan well, you will miss deadlines, and you will waste time and...

About the Author

Terry Schmidt is a certified project management professional (PMP with 30-plus years of experience. He teaches project management at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin.

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