Key Project Management Based on Effective Project Thinking

This book provides an effective overall approach and concrete action strategies to help readers quickly grasp key aspects of project management and reduce the pressure during the learning process, so that they can soon start enjoying the fruits of successful project management. The problems discussed in this book have been drawn both from several years of theoretical research on the part of the author, and from communications between the author and hundreds of business executives and project managers from many domestic and international EMBA and CEO classes. The book’s unique content is written in an easy-to-follow tone with typical Chinese systemic and dialectical thinking, intended to help readers find the appropriate way to solve problems as they encounter them.

One of the popular misunderstandings about project management is to make project managers to take most of the responsibilities for project success, i.e. senior managers in companies usually think project management is not their business. This book puts project management in business context to eliminate this misunderstanding and demonstrates that: only if the senior managers recognize the value of projects and play their roles in project governance and project management right, their companies can survive and develop in the changing society. In order to solve the contradiction between the uniqueness of a project and the efficiency/reliability of its management, this book examines, based on Chinese dial

ectical logic, the basic preparation needed for successful project management, including how to use unified principles to manage projects with different characteristics, how to create company-wide project governance infrastructure to make project managers to be able to take their management responsibilities, and how to establish effective relationships among project stakeholders to make unique projects to be manageable structured partner social networks, etc. This book explains how to deal with the key contradictions existing in each phase of a project, from project decision-making to close-out.

This book is basically for both top managers of companies and project managers, so it addresses many challenges companies and project managers will have to face in the changing society, and provides essential strategies and methods for overcoming them.

This book is not an another book to talk about project management knowledge or successful project management stories, it is about basic project thinking and corresponding insights to deal with key common issues in projects, which are essential to manage projects and even companies reliably in the changing and unreliable society.

Prof. Ronggui Ding is the director of Project Management Institute in Shandong University, China. He received his PhD degree on Systems Engineering in Okayama University (Japan) and Tianjin University (China) in 1997, and got IPMA C-level certificate in 2001. He is now the vice president of Beijing Project Management Association and a well-known professor of Shandong University. He has been teaching project management, especially project governance and project human resource management for EMBA (Executive Master of Business Administration) and EDP (Executive Developing Program) and MPM (Master of Project Management) students in more than 10 universities in China, UK, South Africa and Italy for more than 10 years. He has trained more than 10 thousand senior managers in different countries, industries and government sectors. His books on project management are also well accepted by project managers and corporate managers. Because of his outstanding research outputs, he was honoured as an excellent talent by China Ministry of Education in 2007. Since 2006, he has been an IPMA (International Project Management Association) Award Assessor/Team Lead Assessor/Assessor Trainer and assessed projects in Germany, Russia, Italy, Iran, etc. He was a member of the IPMA Award Management Board from 2007 to 2012, and a member of PMI (Project Management Institute, USA) Global Accreditation Committee for Project Management Education Programs (GAC) in China, and a visiting professor for MSPME (Master in Strategic Project Management European) students in Italy and UK.