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Published:
April 19, 2022

Project Management For Dummies

Overview

Improve your project management skills and accomplish more in no time at all

In these days when projects seem to be bigger and more challenging than ever before, you need to make sure tasks stay on track, meet the budget, and keep everyone in the loop. Enter Project Management For Dummies. This friendly guide starts with the basics of project management and walks you through the different aspects of leading a project to a successful finish. After you've navigated your way through a couple of projects, you'll have the confidence to tackle even bigger (and more important) projects!

In addition to explaining how to manage projects in a remote work environment, the book offers advice on identifying the right delivery approach, using social media in project management, and deploying agile project management. You'll also discover:

  • What's new in project management tools and platforms so you can choose the best application for your team
  • How to perfect your project management business document with an emphasis on strategy and business knowledge
  • Details on the shift from process-based approaches to more holistic, principle-based strategies focused on project outcomes
  • Examples of how to turn the strategies into smooth-flowing processes
  • Best practices and suggestions for dealing with difficult or unexpected situations

If you're planning to enroll in a project management course or take the Project Management Professionals Certification exam, Project Management For Dummies is the go-to resource to help you prepare. And if you simply want to improve your outcomes, this handy reference will have you and your team completing project goals like ninjas!

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About The Author

STANLEY PORTNY, PMP (RANDOLPH, NJ) was an internationally recognized expert in project management. He was the founder and president of Stanley E. Portny and Associates LLC, a company that focuses on the human side of project management. He was the author of all previous editions of Project Management For Dummies. JONATHAN PORTNY, MBA, PMP (ASHLAND, MA) is the son of Stan Portny and a certified PMP with strong technical and management background. Extensive experience leading interdisciplinary & cross-geographical technical projects, programs, and personnel.

Sample Chapters

project management for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Because of the ever-growing array of huge, complex, and technically challenging projects in today's world, effective project managers are in higher demand than ever before.People need the tools, techniques, and knowledge to handle their project management assignments, such as confirming a project's justification, developing project objectives and schedules, maintaining commitment for a project, holding people accountable, and avoiding common project pitfalls.

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Articles from
the book

When you begin a project, you always feel the pressure to jump in and start working immediately to meet the aggressive time schedules. Although you’re not exactly sure where to start, you know you have the greatest chance of success if you plan out your project before you begin the actual work. Answer these ten questions to make sure you’ve completely identified all the work your project will require.
Beware of developing a schedule by backing in — that is, starting at the end of a project and working your way back toward the beginning to identify activities and estimate durations that allow you to meet your client’s desired end date. Using this approach substantially decreases the chances that you’ll meet the schedule for the following reasons: You may miss activities because your focus is on meeting a time constraint, not on ensuring that you’ve identified all required work.
The decision whether or not to allow a proposed project to proceed to the next phase of its life cycle (organizing and preparing) is the last step of the first stage of the project’s life cycle (starting the project). The last step of one phase that leads to the first step of another phase is called a phase gate.
In addition to personnel, your project may require a variety of other important resources (such as furniture, fixtures, equipment, raw materials, and information). Plan for these non-personnel resources the same way you plan to meet your personnel requirements. As part of your plan, develop the following: A non-personnel resources matrix Non-personnel usage charts A non-personnel summary usage chart A non-personnel resources matrix such as the one you see below displays the following information for every lowest-level component (or work package) in your project work breakdown structure, or WBS: The non-personnel resources needed to perform the activities that comprise the work package.
Unless all your activities are on a critical path, your network diagram doesn’t specify your exact project schedule. Rather, it provides information for you to consider when you develop your schedule. After you select your actual dates, choose one of the following commonly used formats in which to present your schedule: Milestone list: A table that lists milestones and the dates you plan to reach them Activity list: A table that lists activities and the dates you plan to start and end them Combined milestone and activity report: A table that includes milestone and activity dates Gantt (or bar) chart: A timeline that illustrates when each activity starts, how long it continues, and when it ends Combined milestone and Gantt chart: A timeline that illustrates when activities start, how long they continue, when they end, and when selected milestones are achieved Consider this example.
You want to be a better project manager, right? Well, before you really jump in, do a quick self-evaluation to see what your strengths and weaknesses are. By answering the following ten questions, you can get an idea of what subjects you need to spend more time on so you can be as effective as possible. Good luck!
When people accept a responsibility, they give you the right to hold them accountable for their performance. Even if you technically have no direct authority over a person on your project team, act as if you have the authority, unless you're specifically told otherwise. Here are some effective ways to hold the people on your project team accountable: Involve the people who have authority over your team members.
Being assigned to a project full time doesn’t mean a person can perform project work at peak productivity 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year. Additional personal and organizational activities reduce the amount of work people produce. Therefore, consider each of the following factors when you estimate the number of hours that people need to complete their project assignments: Productivity: The results a person produces per unit of time that he spends on an activity.
You can't do your project alone; as project manager, you need your team members to work together to successfully reach the project's final objectives and goals. Follow these tips to bring enthusiasm and commitment to your project team (and to maintain both throughout your project's life cycle): Clarify project benefits for the organization and for individual team members.
At the end of your project, you’ll need to make sure you take care of the necessary administrative issues. Just as you must have authorization for people to legally spend time, effort, and resources to perform work on your project, you must rescind this authorization when you close the project to ensure that people won’t continue to spend time, effort, or resources on it in the future.
People who make promises, fail to keep them, and then suffer no consequences create some of the worst frustrations in a project environment. Observe these guidelines to encourage people to honor commitments to you: If you’re responsible, you should be held accountable. In other words, if you make a promise, you should always experience consequences based on how well you keep your promise.
A stakeholder’s potential impact on a project depends on the power she can exercise and the interest she has in exercising that power. Assessing the relative levels of each helps you decide with whom you should spend your time and effort to realize the greatest benefits.Power is a person’s ability to influence the actions of others.
In project terms, authority refers to the overall right to make project decisions that others must follow, including the right to apply project resources, expend funds, or give approvals. Having opinions about how an aspect should be addressed is different from having the authority to decide how it will be addressed.
Working on overlapping tasks can place conflicting demands on a person, whether the tasks are on one project or several. Although successfully addressing these conflicts can be more difficult when more than one project manager is involved, the techniques for analyzing them are the same whether you’re the only project manager involved or you’re just one of many.
Sometimes a terrific idea for a project just pops into your head. However, though you always want to allow for unplanned, spontaneous creativity, most successful organizations choose to pursue a more carefully thought-out process for investigating those information sources that’ll most likely highlight projects that will be of greatest value to them.
You can get a sense of the power you have over someone by taking note of the willingness with which she agrees to do what you need for the project and then does what you request. If you already get all the cooperation from others that you need, just keep doing what you’re doing. However, if you feel frustrated by people’s resistance and lack of cooperation when you ask for their help, take steps to improve the power you have over them.
Suppose your initial schedule has you finishing your project in three months, but your client wants the results in two months. Consider the following options for reducing the length of your critical paths: Recheck the original duration estimates. Be sure you’ve clearly described the activity’s work. If you used past performance as a guide for developing the durations, recheck to be sure all characteristics of your current situation are the same as those of the past performance.
A stakeholder register template is a predesigned stakeholder register that contains typical categories and stakeholders for a particular type of project. You may develop and maintain your own stakeholder register templates for tasks you perform, functional groups may develop and maintain stakeholder register templates for tasks they typically conduct, or your organization’s project management office may develop and maintain templates for the entire organization.
Controlling your project throughout its performance requires that you collect appropriate information, evaluate your performance compared with your plan, and share your findings with your project’s stakeholders. Selecting and preparing your tracking systems Effective project control requires that you have accurate and timely information to help you identify problems promptly and take appropriate corrective action.
A key requirement for project management success is knowing why the project was created in the first place. In addition to helping ensure that the appropriate objectives and desired results are framed at the outset, this knowledge energizes project team members and fuels their commitment to achieve those objectives and results.
Because of the ever-growing array of huge, complex, and technically challenging projects in today's world, effective project managers are in higher demand than ever before.People need the tools, techniques, and knowledge to handle their project management assignments, such as confirming a project's justification, developing project objectives and schedules, maintaining commitment for a project, holding people accountable, and avoiding common project pitfalls.
As a project manager, developing concise and unambiguous project objectives (or statements of your project's desired results) increases the chances that you'll successfully accomplish them. Follow these pointers to ensure your project objectives are crystal clear: Focus on outcomes rather than activities. (For example, "produce a final, approved report" is preferable to "read and review draft report.
Producing your project's results on schedule is an essential requirement for its success. To have the greatest chance of completing your project on time, you need to develop a project schedule that's achievable, responsive to your client's needs, and understood and supported by all project team members. Take the following steps to create a realistic and attainable project schedule: Identify all required activities.
As part of successfully finishing your own project, you need to help your team members complete their project responsibilities and move on to their next assignments. Handling this transition in an orderly and agreed-upon fashion allows people to focus their energies on completing their tasks on your project instead of wondering where and when their next assignments will be.
Following your project all the way through to completion helps ensure that everyone gets the maximum benefits from your project’s results. You also get the chance to compare your project’s benefits with the costs incurred, confirm the company’s return on investment, and validate its process for selecting projects.
Achieving success in a matrix environment requires that you effectively align and coordinate the people who support your project, deflecting any forces that pull those people in different directions. This information can help project managers get the highest-quality work from your team members in a matrix environment and timely and effective support from the functional and senior managers.
Organization decision-makers would love to have a detailed and accurate budget on hand whenever someone proposed a project so they could assess its relative benefits to the organization and decide whether they have sufficient funds to support it. Unfortunately, you can’t prepare such an estimate until you develop a clear understanding of the work and resources the project will require.
Before you rush out and buy any project-management software, plan how to maximize its capabilities and avoid associated pitfalls. Do the following to help you select and install your software: Be sure you have a firm grasp of project-planning and control approaches before you consider any software. See what software other groups in your organization are using or have used; find out what they like, what they don’t like, and why.
Naturally, you’d like to operate in a world where everything is possible — that is, where you can do anything necessary in your project to achieve your desired results. Your clients and your organization, on the other hand, would like to believe that you can achieve everything they want with minimal or no cost to them.
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