Visualizing Project Management, 3rd edition (Forsberg, Mooz, Cotterman, 2005)

Models and Frameworks for Mastering Complex Systems

Projects are becoming the heart of business. This comprehensive revision of the bestselling guide to project management explains the processes, practices, and management techniques you need to implement a successful project culture within your team and enterprise. Visualizing Project Management simplifies the challenge of managing complex projects with powerful, visual models that have been adopted by more than 100 leading government and private organizations.

In this new Third Edition, the authors-leading thinkers and practitioners in the field-keep you on the cutting edge with a sophisticated approach that integrates project management, systems engineering, and process improvement. This advanced content can help take your career and your organization well beyond the fundamentals.

New, downloadable forms, templates, and worksheets make it easy to implement powerful project techniques and tools.

Includes references to the Project Management Institute Body of Knowledge and the INCOSE Handbook to help you pass:

The Project Management Professional Certification Exam

The INCOSE Systems Engineer Certification Exam (CSEP)

"I recommend this book to all those who aspire to project management [and] those who must supervise it."
—Norman R. Augustine, former chairman and CEO Lockheed Martin Corporation

"The importance of this excellent book, able to encompass these two key disciplines [systems engineering and project management], cannot be overemphasized."
—Heinz Stoewer, President, INCOSE

iii [JLJ - dedication]To those who master complexity and provide us with simple, elegant solutions.

xxi The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. - Hans Hoffman

p.8 Systems thinking, powered by visual models, stimulates creative - rather than adaptive - behavior... Systems thinkers see the root causes and courses of action that control events.

p.11 Properly constructed models are valuable tools because they focus attention on critical issues while stripping away less important details that tend to obscure what is needed to understand and manage... A useful model will be simple, but it must retain the essence of the situation to be managed

p.78 Planning is a continuing activity, not a one-time event.

p.81 what gets rewarded gets done.

p.85 We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. - C.S. Lewis

p.89 A major cause of project failure is insufficient focus on product opportunities and inadequate attention to resolving development risks during the study period.

p.219 The harder it is to plan, the more you need to.

p.279 Project visibility is how you and your team know what's really going on.

p.290 Visibility is only the beginning. The visibility system must lead to statusing and timely corrective action.

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