Creating an Environment for Successful Projects

Ensure the success of your company's special projects

Crisp execution of projects is critical to the survival of today's organizations. This practical book is filled with ideas and examples that will teach you how to build project management competence in your organization.

--Lewis E. Platt, chairman, president and CEO, Hewlett-Packard Company

Finally, a book that fills the void on how to develop project management as an organizational practice. Using the enviable processes already in place at Hewlett-Packard and other progressive companies as touchstones, Graham and Englund serve up solid, results-oriented advice on how upper management can create an environment that supports the success of special projects, especially the development of new products. Building on an incisive examination of the critical role upper-tier management plays in the overall success of projects, the authors show managers exactly what they must do to support the process and implement project management as an organization-wide directive. Packed with leading-edge, real-world examples, a sample project review and other tools, this book will help your organization make and sustain the cultural changes that encourage a project manager's best work.

ROBERT J. GRAHAM is an indepAndent management consultant and senior associate with the Strategic Management Group. He is on the adjunct faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and is associate professor of the Project Management Unit at Henley Management College in Henley, England and the author of Project Management As If People Mattered. RANDALL L. ENGLUND is a project manager at Hewlett-Packard Company and a consultant on the Project Management Initiative team that provides corporate-wide leadership for the continuous improvement of project management. He is a member of the Project Management Institute and is on the Board of Directors for the Product Development and Management Association.