Overview
Managing a project can be stressful enough without the added difficulty of coordinating project members working from different sites—or even continents! Managing Virtual Projects outlines techniques, practices, and products that are being effectively used by virtual project managers around the globe.
With more projects being outsourced every day, managers will turn here to get the knowledge they need on maintaining quality and budget controls, developing documentation standards, implementing essential technologies such as Microsoft's EPM or Primavera, and more.
Synopsis
Virtual project management techniques of today's global leaders, and how they can be implemented in your organization
In an increasingly budget-conscious business arena, downsizing and outsourcing have become the new facts of life. A company's employees must be able to work together as if they shared an office—even when they are in different facilities, cities, or even continents.
Managing Virtual Projects shows project managers how to overcome geographic distances, cultural diversity, and time zone disparities to make the new global workplace a competitive advantage instead of an obstacle. Sidestepping theory and guesswork to provide a practical, hands-on portrait of virtual project management (VPM) and electronic project management (ePM) in action, this timely book provides project managers with the knowledge and tools they need to:
- Structure VPM teams and adapt PERT, CPM, and other conventional techniques for VPM success
- Implement proven VPM tools and procedures to control project and collaboration quality
- Leverage environment, expertise, and technology to develop a VPM focused office
Unlike the old days, it's no longer the big companies that eat the small; it's the fast that eat the slow. And the fast are on a 24-hour workday. Managing Virtual Projects reveals everything the new breed of project managers must know to help their organizations become leaders in this new multinational and multicultural, yet one-world, environment.
Studies indicate that more than 70 percent of projects end up late, over budget, or both. Increased globalization threatens to worsen these already daunting numbers.
Managing Virtual Projects shows project leaders as well as company decision-makers how to reverse this costly trend, by providing the knowledge and tools they need to assess, control, and complete mission-critical projects from a distance. Written by Marcus Goncalves, a pioneer and innovator in the design and implementation of virtual project management (VPM) and electronic project management (ePM) systems, this timely guidebook explores the cultural, political, and operational challenges of VPM. At the same time, it provides project managers and members with a step-by-step primer for maximizing the advantages of VPM, while minimizing or even eliminating the disadvantages.
Intended to enhance core cross-cultural management competencies in any environment, Managing Virtual Projects features:
- A proven methodology for developing VPM one step at a time
- Time-saving details on technologies that support VPM—Microsoft's EPM, Primavera, and others
- A hands-on, results-oriented examination of available VPM tools and systems
- Strategies for using VPM to uncover and leverage expertise in previously untapped geographic areas.
- Case studies, along with "lessons learned," of VPM solving vital logistical concerns across a wide range of environments
The time-honored "managing by walking around" system may have worked fine in the past, when every project team member was in the same building or just around the corner. But it has severe limitations in today's high-pressure, globally diffused work environment, where coworkers may not work the same shift or even speak the same language.
Managing Virtual Projects demonstrates virtual project management best practices already being used around the globe. It outlines an innovative and cost-effective VPM approach, and details the communications and collaboration technologies available today to support that approach—to help the vision of the 24-hour-a-day workplace become a reality.
Marcus Goncalves is president of Marcus Goncalves Consulting Group (MGCG), an international consulting practice with more than a dozen years of experience in North and Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. A globally acclaimed expert in the understanding and application of knowledge and change management issues, Goncalves also lectures at Boston University and is the former CEO of iCloud, Inc. He is the author of The Knowledge Tornado: Bridging the Corporate Knowledge Gap, Firewalls: A Complete Guide, and more than two dozen other titles. Goncalves is both a certified project management professional (PMP) and member of the Project Management Institute.