The authors of a new book present a flexible, adaptive model for approving, planning and managing projects, with a language and roadmap that managers and teams can use to analyze expected benefits and make better decisions to achieve desired business results.
No organization can survive today without successful projects. From the development of the iPhone to the execution (or lack of) on Boston’s Big Dig, to the recent rollout of Oracle 11g, projects are the engines that drive innovation from idea to commercialization. But projects are also the drivers that make organizations better, stronger, and more competitive — yet when they fail, it can be devastating. Traditionally, the success of a project is measured by satisfying the triple constraint: meeting time, budget, and specifications. Once projects are launched, they are greatly detached from changes in the environment, technology, or markets.
In their new book, Reinventing Project Management: The Diamond Approach to Successful Growth and Innovation (Harvard Business School Press), Aaron Shenhar of Stevens Institute of Technology and Dov Dvir of Ben-Gurion University present a new multidimensional model for assessing and planning project success. This Diamond Approach is based on a success-focused, flexible and adaptive framework that assumes that projects should be treated as business-