The One-Page Project Manager January 15, 2008 (By Clark A. Campbell, John Wiley & Sons, 140 pages, $19.95)
By Skip Corsini
Overall Rating: 4 stars
"Efficient, effective, well-designed project management has the right of details, while avoiding too many."
Speaking of tools too cool for school, check out this practical guide that can take a major project that has everybody nervous and turn it into a one-page document that does the job of tracking progress, communicating the details to the boss, and providing the most essential details, all the while making the project team look like a bunch of geniuses.
As I read the book, I was looking out for one thing: the definition of a project. Seems like pretty much all work these days is assigned the name "project" for some reason or other. When we were in school, a project was something in addition to normal school work. Mr. Campbell says projects are activities with "well-defined parameters with their own time frames and goals. And they are not repeated. Ordinary work is repeated over and over again."
OK, smarty pants, then what is project management? Campbell says it's the "planning, organizing, directing, and controlling of company resources for a relatively short-term objective that has been established to complete specific goals and objectives…it supplies the project team with a process that helps create the right project at the right time for the right customer, within established resource limits."
In Campbell's scheme, the five essential elements of a project are tasks, objectives, timeline, cost, and owners. To get more info., you'll have to buy the book—a steal at 20 bucks. Go for it.
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