When Artech House authors write their books, we ask them what they want their readers to get out of the project. In this series, we show you what our authors, in their own words, wish to impart upon readers. Nehal Patel, author of Practical Project Management for Engineers, describes what her book is about:
Practical Project Management for Engineers provides common sense solutions to get projects rolling from contract award to delivery while increasing productivity by 5 to 10-fold in short order. This book walks the new technical project manager through step-by-step processes on h ow to delivery high quality, robust products, and services while strengthening one’s team and customer relationships. In creating this book, we compared DoD, NASA, and PMI project lifecycle processes and provide the best practices that have worked for our panel of experts on real world projects. This book is practical NOT theoretical. We tell you ‘what you need to do on Monday’.
Having read the thousands of pages of guidance from the DoD, NASA, PMI, and best management practices from renowned leadership gurus the like of Steven Covey and Peter Drucker, we provide you this distilled knowledge in an easy to follow dialog. This knowledge will equip you; the new technical project manager, to deliver quality products on-time and on-budget. Each chapter walks through a detailed step-by-step process and provides the most important activities and techniques that will aide any new project manager. The last chapter of this book Tales from the Trenches was written by our panel of industry experts, gives insight to their lessons learned on real world projects. In the real world, projects rarely meet schedules, nor do they avoid any changes to the scope. In this book, we show you how to manage recovery plans and customer relationships to continue the future growth of your company. Giving you a practical understanding on what is important to get solutions to delivery quality products. This publication introduces the new technical project manager to the core processes we have identified for effective project management including:
- Communication management: over communicate, Listen first
- Scope management: what does the customer expect?
- Schedule management: who does what and by when?
- Requirements management: The product or service to deliver
- Risk Management: What could go wrong and what is the impact?
- Vendor Management: Visit the vendor in person (rule#1 for NASA Project Mangers)
- Resource management: What you need to do on Monday.
- Cost Management: Get Paid.
- Configuration Management: Everyone working from the same sheet of music.
- Quality Management: Build quality and robustness into the product, the first time.
The results of one process will affect one or more of the other processes and the subject matter experts (SMEs) recruited to lead each of these processes are supporting members of the other processes.
- Understand what and how you must deliver a product and/or service before beginning any work.
- What you need to deliver a product and/or service on-time and on-budget per contract?
- Understand who’s your project team to build, assemble, test, and deliver a product?
- How you going to get paid upfront full amount, incremental amount, or after delivery full amount?
- How you going to manage recovery plans since it’s not ideal world and things will fall behind schedule and under budget?
For more information or to order, click here.
