Mastering Project Leadership

Insights from the Research

Pedro Serrador

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781040105153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

This is a collection of essays from key researchers in the field of project management who describe what they feel are the most impactful findings from research. In the challenging and competitive world of project management, project managers need all the insight they can get. Leading researchers share what they believe are the most important findings from the research being done today. These cover pressing topics confronting project managers, including hybrid methodologies, schedule overruns, schedule estimation, project efficiency, and managing local stakeholders. Highlights include the following:

• Jeff Pinto and Kate Davis explore the "Normalization of Deviance" (NoD) phenomenon within various organizational settings, focusing on projects. NoD involves the gradual acceptance of deviant practices, diverging from established norms, and often leading to detrimental outcomes.
• Francesco Di Maddaloni investigates how local communities' stakeholders are perceived, identified, and categorized by project managers in major public infrastructure and construction projects (MPIC). His chapter helps project managers to have a better understanding of a more inclusive and holistic approach to engage with a broader range of stakeholders.
• Lavagnon Ika, Peter Love, and Jeff Pinto suggest that error and bias combine to exact a toll on major projects, offer theoretical insights, and outline practical recommendations for project managers.
• Jonas Söderlund offers managerial guidelines for leveraging deadlines as powerful tools for generating project success.
• Pedro M. Serrado looks at empirical studies that link planning quality to project success, emphasizing its importance. He also discusses the downsides of excessive planning, particularly in dynamic environments and research and development projects.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 When Our Project Culture Fails Us: The Normalization of Deviance Trap
• 2 Balanced Leadership: Making Use of All Leadership Skills in the Project Team
• 3 Three Themes of Project Management
• 4 Before You Start Managing that Major Project, What You Should Know about Cost Overruns and Benefit Shortfalls
• 5 Why “Well-Padded” Projects Continue to Be Late
• 6 Are Agile Projects More Successful?
• 7 Managing Complex Projects
• 8 Managing the Benefits of Collaborative Projects
• 9 Agile, Traditional, and Hybrid Approaches to Project Success: Is Hybrid a Poor Second Choice?
• 10 Deadline. Dead-Line. Breathing Life into Projects
• 11 Our Love Affair with Project Slack (and Why It Ruins Our Schedule Accuracy)
• 12 How Principles Can Make Agile Benefits Realisation Successful
• 13 The Relationship Between Project Success and Project Efficiency
• 14 You've Just Inherited Someone Else's Project: Now What?
• 15 Local Communities Stakeholder Defined: Identification and Categorization in Major Infrastructure Projects
• 16 What Planning Effort Optimizes Project Success?
• 17 Increasing Odds in Uncertain Times: Creating Value through Collaborative Learning
• Index