Managing Projects in Organizations

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Managing Projects

in Organizations

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J. Davidson Frame

Managing Projects

in Organizations

How to Make the Best Use of Time,

Techniques, and People

Third Edition

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Copyright © 2003 by J. Davidson Frame.

Published by Jossey-Bass

A Wiley Imprint

989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Frame, J. Davidson.

Managing projects in organizations : how to make the best use of time, techniques,

and people / by J. Davidson Frame.—3rd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7879-6831-5 (alk. paper)

1. Project management. I. Title.

HD69.P75F72 2003

658.4'04—dc21

2003014283

Printed in the United States of America

THIRD EDITION

HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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The Jossey-Bass

Business & Management Series

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ix

QContents

Preface xi

The Author xix

Introduction: Understanding the Process of

Managing Projects 1

Part One: The Project Context: People, Teams,

and the Organization

1 Operating Within the Realities of Organizational Life 25

2 Finding and Working with Capable People 50

3 Structuring Project Teams and Building Cohesiveness 80

Part Two: Project Customers and Project Requirements

4 Making Certain the Project Is Based on a Clear Need 111

5 Specifying What the Project Should Accomplish 137

Part Three: Project Planning and Control

6 Tools and Techniques for Keeping the Project on Course 163

7 Managing Special Problems and Complex Projects 210

8 Achieving Results: Principles for Success as a

Project Manager 241

References 249

Index 251

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To Deborah and Sally

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Preface

The first edition of Managing Projects in Organizations was published

in 1987. Its entry into the marketplace at that time was propitious, be￾cause it coincided with a surging worldwide interest in project man￾agement. From the beginning, book sales were respectable. Quite a

few colleges and universities adopted it for use in introductory courses

in project management, and training departments in organizations

such as AT&T, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac distributed it to em￾ployees who were studying project management topics.

The second edition was published in 1995. Although the funda￾mental premises of project management had not changed since the

book first came out, new developments in the business arena altered

the business environment sufficiently that the book’s contents needed

to be adjusted to reflect the new conditions. For example, the explo￾sive growth of Total Quality Management in the late 1980s and early

1990s put customers at center stage of all business activity. My copi￾ous references to “end users” in the first edition seemed too limiting

in the new environment. In the second edition, I broadened my ap￾proach to address the concerns of all customers, not just end users.

Time marches on, and it became necessary to issue this newest edi￾tion of Managing Projects in Organizations. Of particular note has

been the growing influence of the Project Management Institute

(PMI) as the world’s standard-setting body in project management.

In 1996 and again in 2000, PMI made revisions to its A Guide to the

Project Management Body of Knowledge, known best by its acronym,

PMBOK (PMI, 1996, 2000). In these revisions, PMI took major steps

toward updating world standards on project management practice.

For example, over the years, there has been substantial confusion

about how work breakdown structures (WBSs) should be developed.

One approach was to focus on product-oriented WBSs and the other

on task-oriented WBSs. PMI finally resolved this issue in 2001 when

it published PMI Practice Standard for Work Breakdown Structures

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(PMI, 2001) and suggested that WBSs could contain both product and

task elements.

Another example: Many business enterprises were reluctant to

adopt the important earned-value approach to integrated cost and

schedule control because they saw this method as too arcane. It orig￾inated in the military and employed unfriendly terminology that was

difficult to comprehend. Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing

through today, the earned-value community has made some changes

to earned-value processes and vocabulary to make this method more

accessible to ordinary businesses.

This third edition of Managing Projects in Organizations has been

updated to accommodate changes in the business environment and

project management practices that have arisen since 1995. In addition

to the changes already noted, the book has new material on establish￾ing a project office, managing project portfolios, and managing vir￾tual teams.

INTENDED AUDIENCE

Let the reader beware! Managing Projects in Organizations is designed

to be an introduction to project management. It is written to provide

readers with a fairly quick and painless overview of key issues. I re￾cently received a copy of a project management textbook by a prom￾inent author. It is more than one thousand pages long! I suspect that

novices would take one look at this book and conclude that proj￾ect management is an arcane discipline best left to engineers with

plenty of technical training. In my opinion, that conclusion would be

incorrect.

This book is written for information age workers searching for a

way to get a handle on the projects they have been assigned to run. I

am talking here about office workers, educators, information systems

managers, R&D personnel, lawyers, writers, budgeters, and the vast

number of other people whose work causes them to manipulate

information rather than tangible things. It is likely that these individ￾uals have drifted into positions of responsibility as a natural out￾growth of their routine activities. By showing some degree of initiative

and organizational ability in carrying out their daily tasks, they find

one day that they have been given responsibility for carrying out a

project.

xii PREFACE

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT AS THE

ACCIDENTAL PROFESSION

Project management has been called the accidental profession. It is ac￾cidental in at least two senses. First, until quite recently, it has not been

a profession that people have consciously chosen to pursue. No child

answers the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

with the answer, “Why, a project manager, of course!” People typically

become project managers after stumbling onto project management

responsibilities.

Project management is an accidental profession in a second sense

as well: knowledge of how to run projects often is not acquired

through systematic inquiry but is gained in a hit-or-miss fashion. Hav￾ing received little or no formal preparation for their jobs, typical proj￾ect managers set out to reinvent the fundamental precepts of project

management. Frequently, their trial-and-error efforts result in costly

mistakes. If novice project managers are good at their jobs, they chalk

up these mistakes to experience and avoid them in the future. After

five to ten years of this process, the novice (if he or she has survived

this long) graduates to the status of seasoned professional.

Great strides have been made in recent years to reduce the level of

accident in our projects. Beginning in the late 1980s, key decision

makers in organizations began to realize that the project management

approach could offer them significant help in achieving results in

chaotic times. To diminish the level of accident in managing projects,

organizations began requiring their employees to learn project man￾agement skills more systematically.

Today, many companies are working diligently to improve their

project management competencies. Interestingly, this new commit￾ment to project management excellence is occurring in a wide array

of industries. Some are traditional project-focused industries, such as

construction, aerospace, and defense. But most of the commitment

seems to be coming from nontraditional information age industries,

such as telecommunications, computer systems, banking, insurance,

and pharmaceuticals.

Commitment to upgrading project management skills is not solely

a North American concern. East Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and

Latin American organizations are now putting their employees

through project management training programs and encouraging

Preface xiii

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them to become certified Project Management Professionals through

the certification program of the Project Management Institute.

MY EXPERIENCES

I have worked with information age projects all my adult life. As an

undergraduate and graduate student, I was immersed in information￾based projects for homework assignments, computer programming,

term papers, and finally my doctoral dissertation. In industry, I was a

full-time project manager for seven years, running about twenty-five

archetypical information age projects. Most of them involved the de￾sign of scientific research evaluation systems, software development,

office automation, and the writing of technical reports. Like 99 per￾cent of my colleagues, I learned project management on the job. In

1979, I left industry for academia, and since then I have been teach￾ing graduate courses on project management.

Since 1983, I have also been conducting seminars on the manage￾ment of information age projects. About thirty thousand experienced

project managers have taken these seminars. My family refers to them

as my road show, since they are held in different cities throughout the

world. I first took my road show abroad in the summer of 1985, when

I carried it to China, where I frequently return with my project man￾agement courses. I have also delivered seminars in Hong Kong, Singa￾pore, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Korea, France,

Germany, Great Britain, Spain, Finland, Poland, South Africa, and

Canada. It is comforting to see that Murphy’s Law is as alive abroad

as in the United States.

CONTENTS OF THE BOOK

My experiences as both a practicing project manager and a teacher

have led me to conclude that what information age project profes￾sionals want and need is a practical and flexible approach to managing

their projects. This book is designed to give them such an approach.

It recognizes that many of the commonly employed tools used on tra￾ditional projects are of limited utility to information age knowledge

workers. It shows how the traditional tools, with some modification,

can be usefully employed on these projects. It also offers insights into

new tools that are emerging and are ideally suited for application on

information age projects. Readers interested in a more advanced treat￾xiv PREFACE

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