Goal Directed Project Management – Third Edition

Citation

Simpson, P. (2006), "Goal Directed Project Management – Third Edition", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 239-240. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437730610657776

This third edition of the book continues in presenting the authors' Goal Directed Project Management (GDPM) as a means of enabling organizations to develop their systems, organizations and people through a process to deliver projects. The authors have a wealth of experience in management of projects from a practical and educational perspective. The book's index outlines the chapters in an amalgam of: chronological activities through the project; levels of detail from the strategic down to detail; tasks from planning through organization to project control; and responsibilities of roles within a project.

The book follows a worked example throughout and in the final chapter develops this example through the project stages using the GPDM process with suggested formats completed for the example of “New possibilities in new premises” with the project title deliberately describing the intended outcome – one of the features of the GDPM process.

The vehicle for the book and the most significant difference from most other works in the field is a perspective for projects under the PSO acronym – standing for people, systems and organization. The approach the authors take with this is for balancing the needs of a project to satisfy technical, organizational and user needs. In presenting the PSO format project management is presented as a change of the organization's state rather than the highly focussed technical projects many of us have seen before. Project management in this approach is taken from the technical to the strategic and into organizational development. In the early chapters the authors tackle head on the responsibility of the base organization, particularly the leaders, in supporting the temporary project structure they have put in place to deliver the project objectives while balancing the need to deliver the routine business the organization exists to provide. A chapter on pitfalls addresses stages of the project from planning through to control, and gives examples of individuals who can influence the success of the project even to the point of causing it to fail and details of typical problem areas such as goal definition at the project planning stage.

Through the book they present the GDPM process starting with a detailed description of what projects are and why they are different from the routine. Directed, as the book is, at project managers it is unlikely there will be much new to experienced readers in the early sections. The terminology is probably familiar – although there are some differences – the authors use a project mandate instead of the project brief that many will know. In the middle section the authors take us through the project process tackling each stage from foundation through planning and organization at first global and then detail level to project control. Their emphasis throughout is on the organization using the GDPM tools to enable it to plan, organize and manages the project to meet overall objectives and develop the organization so that the benefits are realized. There are many examples throughout of how the tools can be misused – for example, in the section on project control they recount examples of project reports that achieve little except a pile of paper. They use suggested formats to highlight responsibilities throughout project team and base organization to achieve project goals.

The jewel in the crown for me is the chapter on project culture. Towards the end of the book the authors attempt to manage expectations by an organization of its project managers. They reinforce their principles outlined in the early definition of the PSO process and GDPM and allocate specific areas of responsibility to groups within the existing organization to, for example, senior management and line managers. There are many examples in other works where project managers are treated as superhuman – the authors attack this head on and emphasize both skills and character flaws of project managers – and end up confirming good project managers to be worth their weight in gold while some who lack the balance of skills inadequate for their positions to develop the organization. The final recommendation is for project management to be ingrained in the culture of the organization through a programme under the heading of “Projectivity” whereby a series of projects are running simultaneously to achieve a strategic development of the organization and deliver improved performance.