Project Management at the Edge of Chaos

Project Management at the Edge of Chaos PDF Author: Alfred Oswald
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3662482614
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Complexity is a gift that can be made available for the successful implementation of projects, and used to create a new order or to change an existing one. Based on scientific facts, the authors present a systematic approach, which integrates complexity and its multitude of facets and gives practical recommendations for dealing with complexity in projects. The methods paradigm in project management is currently undergoing a massive upheaval. Projects are complex entities that cannot be tackled using traditional methods, such as classical cause and effect approaches. Complexity, and the associated phenomenon of self-organization, is a natural, but hidden designer. It offers a great opportunity in its use as a key driver for the implementation of projects. This requires identification of the principles of complexity and then using these for project management. In this book, the latest findings from natural sciences and brain research are used and transferred within a practice-oriented framework. The authors describe the methods of complexity regulation in projects and how self-organization for the management of projects can be applied.

Project Management at the Edge of Chaos

Project Management at the Edge of Chaos PDF Author: Alfred Oswald
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3662482614
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book

Book Description
Complexity is a gift that can be made available for the successful implementation of projects, and used to create a new order or to change an existing one. Based on scientific facts, the authors present a systematic approach, which integrates complexity and its multitude of facets and gives practical recommendations for dealing with complexity in projects. The methods paradigm in project management is currently undergoing a massive upheaval. Projects are complex entities that cannot be tackled using traditional methods, such as classical cause and effect approaches. Complexity, and the associated phenomenon of self-organization, is a natural, but hidden designer. It offers a great opportunity in its use as a key driver for the implementation of projects. This requires identification of the principles of complexity and then using these for project management. In this book, the latest findings from natural sciences and brain research are used and transferred within a practice-oriented framework. The authors describe the methods of complexity regulation in projects and how self-organization for the management of projects can be applied.

Thriving at the Edge of Chaos

Thriving at the Edge of Chaos PDF Author: Jonathan Sapir
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000732479
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
For many organizations, the way in which projects are managed is a fundamental factor in how well they can prosper in today’s marketplace. Unfortunately, the current solutions available to companies for managing projects are proving to be increasingly ineffective in a complex world that is becoming more and more dynamic and unpredictable. Organization’s pay for this complexity in delayed time-to-market, slow response to customer needs, and decreased productivity. While tweaking the current project management paradigm may provide some minimal gains, to have a real impact requires a fundamental change in mindset. New business models like Uber and AirBnB show us that the most efficient operations in today’s business environment behave like complex adaptive systems (CAS) where self-managing participants, following a set of simple rules, organize themselves to solve incredibly complex problems. Instead of trying to function like a "well-oiled machine" where things "work like clockwork", companies like Uber function more like an organism that is alive and constantly changing. They fully embrace the characteristics of a CAS. Viewing an organization as a complex adaptive system drives a radically new philosophy of project management that is much better suited to the needs of the 21st-century organization and can provide the quantum leap improvement in project production that we are looking for. This book exposes the assumptions underlying the accepted paradigm of project management, describes the common practices that are based on those assumptions, analyzes why these practices are unhelpful and even harmful, and proposes an alternative, sometimes seemingly counter intuitive approach to project management based on CAS thinking. By the end of the book, the reader will have a completely new perspective on the way projects can be managed in their organization, and how they can quickly start reaping the benefits provided by a CAS-driven management methodology and supporting toolset that is more in tune with today’s business demands - and that turns complexity into a competitive advantage.

Leading on the Edge of Chaos

Leading on the Edge of Chaos PDF Author: Emmett C. Murphy
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Based on 30 years of consulting experience, this unique book provides a concrete program for prospering in dangerous times. Using examples, case studies, guidelines, and worksheets, this father and son team explain how exceptional leaders and companies have transformed the threat of economic meltdown into an opportunity for new levels of success.

Edge of Chaos

Edge of Chaos PDF Author: Dambisa Moyo
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465097472
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
From an internationally acclaimed economist, a provocative call to jump-start economic growth by aggressively overhauling liberal democracy Around the world, people who are angry at stagnant wages and growing inequality have rebelled against established governments and turned to political extremes. Liberal democracy, history's greatest engine of growth, now struggles to overcome unprecedented economic headwinds--from aging populations to scarce resources to unsustainable debt burdens. Hobbled by short-term thinking and ideological dogma, democracies risk falling prey to nationalism and protectionism that will deliver declining living standards. In Edge of Chaos, Dambisa Moyo shows why economic growth is essential to global stability, and why liberal democracies are failing to produce it today. Rather than turning away from democracy, she argues, we must fundamentally reform it. Edge of Chaos presents a radical blueprint for change in order to galvanize growth and ensure the survival of democracy in the twenty-first century.

Visualizing Project Management

Visualizing Project Management PDF Author: Kevin Forsberg
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0471746746
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT CLASSIC-REVISED AND EXPANDED Now Includes Downloadable Forms and Worksheets 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

EDGE

EDGE PDF Author: Jim Highsmith
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0135263581
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
EDGE: The Agile Operating Model That Will Help You Successfully Execute Your Digital Transformation “[The authors’] passion for technology allows them to recognize that for most enterprises in the 21st century, technology is THE business. This is what really separates the EDGE approach. It is a comprehensive operating model with technology at its core.” —From the Foreword by Heidi Musser, Executive Vice President and Principal Consultant, Leading Agile; retired, Vice President and CIO, USAA Maximum innovation happens at the edge of chaos: the messy, risky, and uncertain threshold between randomness and structure. Operating there is uncomfortable but it’s where organizations “invent the future.” EDGE is a set of fast, iterative, adaptive, lightweight, and value-driven tools to achieve digital transformation, and EDGE: Value-Driven Digital Transformation is your guide to using this operating model for innovation. Jim Highsmith is one of the world’s leading agile pioneers and a coauthor of the Agile Manifesto. He, Linda Luu, and David Robinson know from their vast in-the-trenches experience that sustainable digital transformation requires far more than adopting isolated agile practices or conventional portfolio management. This hard, indispensable work involves changing culture and mindset, and going beyond transforming the IT department. EDGE embraces an adaptive mindset in the face of market uncertainty, a visible, value-centered portfolio approach that encourages continual value linkages from vision to detailed initiatives, incremental funding that shifts as strategies evolve, collaborative decision-making, and better risk mitigation. This guide shows leaders how to use the breakthrough EDGE approach to go beyond incremental improvement in a world of exponential opportunities. Build an organization that adapts fast enough to thrive Clear away unnecessary governance processes, obsolete “command and control” leadership approaches, and slow budgeting/planning cycles Improve collaboration when major, fast-paced responses are necessary Continually optimize investment allocation and monitoring based on your vision and goals Register your product for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Aid on the Edge of Chaos

Aid on the Edge of Chaos PDF Author: Ben Ramalingam
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199578028
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
Aid has become a tangle of donors and recipients, so unwieldy that it is in danger of collapse. This ground-breaking book presents fresh thinking that transcends the 'more' verses 'less' arguments. Drawing on complexity theory it shows how aid could be transformed into a truly dynamic form of global cooperation fit for the twenty-first century.

Beyond Chaos

Beyond Chaos PDF Author: Larry L. Constantine
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
The popularity of the Management Forum in "Software Development" Magazine is not surprising. Because the majority of software development projects fail to come in on time, on budget, or on specification, software development managers are constantly seeking out management approaches and techniques that will help them achieve success. Many software development projects deteriorate into a state of chaos. In "Beyond Chaos, " the keenest contributions to the Management Forum have been incorporated into a single volume to reveal best practices in managing software projects and organizations. The forty-five essays contained in this book are written by many of the leading names in software development, software engineering, and technical management. Each piece has been selected and edited to provide highly focused ideas and suggestions that can be translated into immediate practice. Pragmatic and provocative, they address key management concerns involving people, planning and productivity, coping under pressure, quality, development processes, and leadership and teamwork. Highlights of the book include: Larry Constantine, "Dealing with Difficult People: Changing the Changeable" Karl Wiegers, "First Things First: A Project Manager's Primer" Capers Jones, "Productivity by the Numbers: What Can Speed Up or Slow Down Software Development" Ed Yourdon, "Death March: Surviving a Hopeless Project" Dave Thomas, "Web-Time Development: High-Speed Software Engineering" Meilir Page-Jones, "Seduced by Reuse: Realizing Reusable Components" Jim Highsmith, "Order for Free: An Organic Model for Adaptation" Steve McConnell, "Managing Outsourced Projects: Project Management Inside-Out" These and many more insightful and advisory essays together represent the cutting edge in software development management and the collective wisdom of the field's most knowledgeable practitioners. Both entertaining and enlightening, "Beyond Chaos" will enrich your skills and enhance your deeper understanding of the process of bringing software from idea to reality. 0201719606B06262001

Complexity

Complexity PDF Author: M. Mitchell Waldrop
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 150405914X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
“If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post). In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell—and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. This book is their story—the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the twenty-first century. “Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner . . . [Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” —The New York Times Book Review “Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” —Medium “[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” —Publishers Weekly

Agile Project Management and Complexity

Agile Project Management and Complexity PDF Author: Czesław Mesjasz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000567494
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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Book Description
This research monograph presents an inter-disciplinary study of the impact, and current status, of applications of complexity-related concepts in the early stages of development of Agile Project Management (APM). The results serve as an introduction for exploring more profound relations between complexity-related ideas and APM in the future. The increasing complexity of software projects and their environment in the 1990s constituted the main determinants of the development of the family of methodological frameworks called Agile Project Management. Development of APM has been shaped by a broadly defined area of research called complexity science or complexity theory based on complex adaptive systems (CAS) and on their characteristics: Complexity, chaos, the edge of chaos, emerging properties, non-linearity, self-organization, etc. In the 21st century, due to the expansion of Agile beyond software development, the challenges deriving from the complexity of projects and the environment are even more urgent or compelling. Such phenomena demand more profound inter- and multi-disciplinary studies. This book examines the impact of applications of complexity-related ideas deriving from intuitive complexity and from complexity science in the early stages of development of the Agile methodological frameworks in project management and considers the current status of those applications. It questions the usefulness of those applications for the practice and theory of APM, and then proposes a conceptual framework for further theoretical studies and several ways of improvement and refinement of the Agile Project Management necessary to deal with broadly defined complexity in project management. Requiring a medium-level knowledge of complexity studies and knowledge of project management, this book is written for the research community studying the links between the various methodological frameworks included in APM and complexity-related ideas. It will also be interesting for studies of the impact of complexity on modern management, and for master’s students on IT and management courses.