This is the book review offered in the January edition of Project Management Tipoffs, the newsletter from Arras People. Check out the full version of this review by going here.
Author: J.A. Flinn
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Size: 312 pages
Reviewed by Adrian Quinney
As a successful international project manager J.A. Flinn has pioneered results risk management as the heart of delivering business transformation and benefits for domestic and international businesses. Her research conducted at Oxford University and the HEC into project success provides a robust foundation for this book. “The 8-Fold Path”, developed for executives and project managers offers a diagnostic framework of the positive and negative factors that affect a projects delivery of business results.
Aimed at those who manage, sponsor, own or deliver IT projects “The Success Healthcheck for IT Projects” should help managers identify and address those projects which consume resources and yet don’t produce results for the business. Case studies and questions are used throughout the book to help the reader better understand the real world elements of assessing and managing it project success or failure rate. The book is split into five distinct sections.
Part 1 is particularly relevant to business executives and CIOs. Since it examines both benchmarking a project and the productivity of projects. The reader is shown how to how to measure project results in the form of yield and how to evaluate portfolio results. In Chapter 3 predictability is identified as a key element of achieving “Predictable Accountable Results” (PAR) for business projects. A project Portfolio Health Check diagnoses the historical health of project results in chapter 5.
Probability is the theme for Part 2 and it’s the place to start if you are a project sponsor or project manager. The main premise being that the performance of organisations projects in the past predicts the performance of future projects. The higher the maturity, the more reliable the project delivery process is going to be and leads to higher probability of project success. Here Results Risk Management TM is introduced as the overarching process where firstly the health of a project is assessed and secondly, action is taken to “Keep, Kill, or Reconsider” the project. Within this process “The 8-Fold Path” is the tool used to diagnose the historic and current risk factors and identify probable success…
Read the full version for free in the January edition of Tipoffs. Also be sure to check out the February edition, which focuses on the expertise of several profiled clients Arras has welcomed to our brand-new Training Directory, a well-ready portal of training information.
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