Making Sense Of Project Realities
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Making Sense of Project Realities
There is more than a touch of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' in the way many organizations approach project management and the consequences are all too clear: project methodology inappropriately applied; little or no consideration of complexity or ambiguity; alienation of the stakeholders and a statistically poor record of performance for major business or infrastructure projects. Charles Smith's groundbreaking book Making Sense of Project Realities offers convincing explanations as to why project management theory and practice have become disconnected and describes the kind of complex, human skills that are required to deliver successful projects. The text draws heavily on the experiences of practising project and programme managers from across private and public sector organizations, many of whose stories were shared and analysed during the two-year research network 'Rethinking Project Management', which brought together thought leaders on project management from consultancy, industry and academia. The result is a highly readable, very credible and imaginative exploration of the nature of projects and programmes that will strike a chord with every project practitioner; a book that offers a realistic set of ideas for developing creative and effective project players, who understand the purpose of what they are doing, the context within which they are working, and the people with whom they need to engage. Update: Several MBA Courses use this book and the tutor feedback is encouragingly positive, including: "can be used from day one to change the mindset of the students concerning projects and their management."
Making Sense of Complexity in Projects
This book explores ‘project management’ (PM) from a new perspective. Project management is facing a paradigmatic stalemate. Its major challenge is complexity. Its current paradigmatic foundation in first-order cybernetics has reached its limits. More tools are created and project management is applied to any potential context, expecting better results while doing more of the same. Beyond conventional project management, agile and other project management approaches have emerged as new options to answer the complexity challenge. Yet, the question remains whether new options and more tools in light of the current shortcomings can create enough momentum for project management as a whole to overcome its paradigmatic stalemate and evolve toward new paradigms based on second-order cybernetics. This book will embark on a journey to explore current paradigms in project management and argue why an analysis of discourse practices in project management may be critical to generating new paradigmatic perspectives. The aim of this book is to provide an alternative perspective on projects as discourses and project management as a means to observe and conduct these discourses. Instead of defining what projects and project management are, the approach is to look at what people talk about when doing projects and apply project management. It will arrive at a picture of how discourses about project management are shaped and institutionalised through the sensemaking of individuals and selected communities in their specific project practice and how these discourses shape project management in turn. It is argued that this self-reinforcing circle leads to a certain solidification of project management paradigms which prove insufficient in dealing with project complexity. However, it will also be argued that project practitioners can utilise their self-reflection and self-description of these discourse conventions to obtain more meaningful project conversations and arrive at a unified and systemically integrated understanding of project management. This book will be of particular relevance to those interested in current issues underlying project management. More generally, it will be a valuable resource for researchers of project management, organisational studies and governance.
Making Sense of Reality
What is reality and how do we make sense of it in everyday life? Why do some realities seem more real than others, and what of seemingly contradictory and multiple realities? This book considers reality as we represent, perceive and experience it. It suggests that the realities we take as ‘real’ are the result of real-time, situated practices that draw on and draw together many things - technologies and objects, people, gestures, meanings and media. Examining these practices illuminates reality (or rather our sense of it) as always ‘virtually real’, that is simplified and artfully produced. This examination also shows us how the sense of reality that we make is nonetheless real in its consequences. Making Sense of Reality offers students and educators a guide to analysing social life. It develops a performance-based perspective (‘doing things with’) that highlights the ever-revised dimension of realities and links this perspective to a focus on object-relations and an ecological model of culture-in-action.