Total Project Control : A Practitioner's Guide to Managing Projects As Investments

There is often a deep disconnect between the project team’s goals and those of the organization. Senior management wants "profitable" projects, but is only able to quantify its wishes in terms of the traditional project management elements: schedule and cost. To operate smoothly, the entire organization must be driven by the single goal of project profitability. Total Project Control presents valuable enhancements to the traditional project management approach, introducing new metrics and techniques for assessing the performance and profitability of projects.

Demonstrating how to maximize the business value of a project, this book discusses new profitability-based data metrics, such as expected monetary value (EMV), expected project profit (EPP), Devaux's Index of Project Performance (DIPP), critical path drag, drag cost, and the cost of leveling with unresolved bottlenecks (CLUB). The impact of implementing these metrics can be far reaching. Not only will good management decisions, at both the project and executive levels, be supported by quantitative data, but bad decisions will become harder to justify.

This book shows how to compute and use the new metrics to rightsize staffing levels for projects, programs, and organizations. It also explains what every project manager needs to know about earned value tracking: its uses, abuses, value, distortions, and potential fixes. The book then extends these metrics into techniques for indexing, tracking, progressing, and improving the business value of projects.

See What’s New in the Second Edition:

• Includes new diagrams and new ways of computing critical path drag in complex networks



• Introduces DIPP Performance Index tracking



• Offers new exercises in how to compute critical path drag and drag cost and use them to maximize project value



• Focuses on topics senior management needs to be assured the project team is using to maximize project profitability

Bajan-born Steve Devaux is a project management theorist, consultant, and academic. He developed TPC, an ROI-based approach to project planning and analysis, as well as such new techniques as critical path drag and the value breakdown structure (VBS). He founded Analytic Project Management in 1992 and has consulted to industries ranging from software to aerospace. He has an M. Sc. in project management from Northeastern University and has taught graduate courses at Brandeis University, Suffolk University, and University of West Indies at Barbados.