Project and Program Excellence

This book provides insight, measures, and tools to manage a program or project to be first place amongst its competitors and similar efforts. Providing breakthrough insight by showing how to understand and use team member motivation, it gives leadership and team members the tools to be first place. It shows program and project managers how to motivate a team to perform better than its competitors while bringing great satisfaction and tailored growth to the team individuals. Highlights include:

• Selecting excellent task leads and determining the best team mix
• Fulfilling motivation needs during program and project execution
• Motivating high-tempo performance

The very best performance of a program or project team occurs when the needs driving the fundamental motivations of team members are being met. This book explains how human motivation analysis substantiates the successful program and project, organizational and process elements that have been applied. By using the measure of providing promised deliverables within cost and schedule constraints and with managed risk, it describes team performance and explains the difference between a high-performance team and an average-performance one. It applies recent research of how motivation applies to programs and projects and how to accordingly organize a team.

Beginning with an introduction of improvement concepts, this book reviews current program and project success statistics and then delves into how to reap the tremendous advantages of modern motivation-based organization leadership. It shows how to determine team member motivation and use it to assemble and execute a first-place program or project. Guidance includes showing how to assign the best mix of motivational types for each team and choosing leadership. Project and Program Excellence: Motivational Leadership for Breakthrough Results offers an organizational and leadership approach for highly successful development efforts.

Thomas Pavelko worked for Lockheed Martin for 37 years. During that time, he recruited and led teams to develop embedded high-performance computer systems to perform critical flight controls. He was promoted to System Engineering Manager, Program Manager, and Program Director. He reported to a wide range of divisions including Satellites, Missiles, R&D, Electronics, Propulsion, Advanced Astronautics, Commercial Space, Missile Defense, Human Spaceflight, and Advanced Development Programs (Skunk Works). He was assigned to large commercial and government programs falling behind, often becoming the new Program Manager. He was directly accountable to customer and corporate leadership for program success. All programs were completed successfully.