New Business Book Summary Available for Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager

Many people who spend their days coordinating and managing projects have never had formal training in project management. In Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager, Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore, and James Wood offer guidance to individuals lacking formal project training who are nevertheless responsible for leading projects. Using proven methods for initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and closing projects, unofficial project managers can find success at work and beyond.

HBR Guide to Project Management

Project management is a daunting task for both those who are new to the business world and seasoned veterans. Keeping a diverse group of people focused, motivated, on budget, and working together toward a common goal is always a challenging undertaking. In HBR Guide to Project Management, tips, advice, and tools are presented that will help both new and veteran project managers deliver results effectively and efficiently. From planning to build-up, implementation, and closeout, the HBR Guide to Project Management guides project managers through each step of their projects, thereby increasing their chances of delivering quality results on time and on budget.

Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers

Project managers require more than knowledge to succeed at their tasks. Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to recognize emotional cues are now essential tools for team leadership. In Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers, Anthony Mersino explains how emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize and understand emotions as well as employ them in the decision-making process, is a crucial asset in successful project management. Effective project managers (PMs) can use emotional intelligence to communicate clearly, set the tone and goals for their projects, engage and motivate team members, foster collaboration, and counter stress and discord. Without these interpersonal competencies PMs risk seeing even the best organized projects fail.

The Other Side of Innovation

Companies fail to innovate when they put more energy and resources into generating “big ideas” than they do implementing them. In The Other Side of Innovation, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble demonstrate how the execution of an innovation initiative is just as important to the process as generating the idea itself. Drawn from their ten years of innovation research on the world’s most respected companies, the authors offer innovation leaders the framework to build teams and plans capable of facilitating the successful execution of any innovation initiative.

The workplace has become project-driven to the point that project management is not only a business activity but an academic field and profession unto itself. While many resources exist for improving communication among members of project teams, there is a gap in the project management profession for tools that facilitate communication with other stakeholders. In The New One-Page Project Manager, Clark Campbell and Mick Campbell fill that void by augmenting existing tools and methodologies with the One-Page Project Manager (OPPM), a simple graphic interface that communicates plans and tracks performance relative to them. This updated edition will help project managers take advantage of the new AgileOPPM™ and the MyOPPM™ template as they work to improve their up, down, and out communication.

In Managing Projects, Lou Russell employs a four-phase project management model: define, plan, manage, and review, to illustrate the nuts and bolts of project management. She prefaces the discussion with a review of the relevant terminology, distinguishing between tasks, projects, and processes. She then devotes a chapter to each of the four phases, followed by chapters dealing with the problems of change associated with projects and the basics of a project management office (PMO) for coordinating multiple projects. The book closes with a review of the basic principles of project management, including a list of ten important principles to keep in mind on any project.