This book explores how agile development practices, in particular pair programming, code review and automated testing, help software development teams to perform better. Agile software engineering has become the standard software development paradigm over the last decade, and the insights provided here are taken from a large-scale survey of 80 professional software development teams working at SAP SE in Germany. In addition, the book introduces a novel measurement tool for assessing the performance of software development teams. No previous study has researched this topic with a similar data set comprising insights from more than 450 professional software engineers.

Successful projects are the basis for a successful company, but many professionals lack the basic skills required to manage projects successfully. The Project Management Toolkit guides readers through each of the four key life-cycle stages that lead to effective project management. Focussed on successful project delivery in the engineering, industrial and process sectors, the books are aligned to the standard PMP (Project Management Professional) body of knowledge from the PMI and APM project management organisations and develop the PM knowledge that career project managers and those who only intermittently lead projects will be expected to use. The books tailor these tools to meet the particular challenges faced in these sectors, which can vary considerably from the needs of the IT, customer or financial services projects that are routinely covered in other guides. Each book can be used as a stand alone guide or be combined to provide a complete and powerful PM resource.
-Get up and running on your project quickly and effectively: books focus one step at a time on the needs of engineering, industrial and process projects for career project managers and those involved with project intermittently
-Practical, hands-on guides for those tasked with capital, product development or operational projects, aligned with the industry-standard PMP body of knowledge
-Accompanied by online project planning and delivery tools, templates, workflow organizers and data sheets, plus check-lists, case studies and copious expert know-how

This third edition of an Artech House bestseller is packed with fresh, field-tested insights on how to plan, lead, and complete projects with unprecedented efficiency. It provides project managers with expanded coverage on critical chain planning, multiple project selection and management, critical change project networks, new Lean techniques related to critical chain project management (CCPM), and effective strategies for bringing about the organisational change required to succeed. This cutting-edge work spells out all the CCPM techniques, tools, and theory managers need to develop critical chain solutions and apply them to their challenging projects. Moreover, the book helps managers master key project skills not covered in other critical chain books, such as scope control and risk management. This easy-to-follow resource shows managers how to shorten project delivery time, eliminate cost and scheduling over-runs, manage project resources more efficiently, reduce stress on their project teams, and finish projects that meet or exceed expectations.

At a time when business demands urge companies to innovate and CIOs face increasing cost pressures, offshore delivery offers the opportunity to industrialize the implementation processes for system harmonization, consolidation, and enhancement, thereby realizing substantial cost savings and quality improvements. Rightshore(R) - a registered trademark of Capgemini - is about organizing the distributed delivery process that embraces on-site, nearshore and offshore services.

This book describes successful global delivery models utilizing industrialized methods to deliver SAP(R) projects from India. While the first part is devoted to management concepts, service offerings and the peculiarities of working together with India, the second part features eight case studies from different industries and from around the world describing how India delivery centers have been successfully deployed in SAP(R) development projects.

* Links the contemporary tools and methodologies in project management (such as Agile, Scrum, Lean) to the context of event management; * Explains and discusses the theory in an applied context, linking to sustainable project management and the latest development in the technology; * Uses a range of international case studies to show the theory in practice; * Includes contributions from a diverse range of international experts; * Online lecturer resources to accompany in the form of teaching ppt slides, end of chapter multiple choice questions and sample questions; This text provides a unique lens for studying event project management in the era of sustainability, digital transformation, smart cities and rapid development in technology. It discusses and explains how to manage events utilising the sustainable project management model adapted to the specific context of event management. Part of the Event Management Theory and Methods Series. This series examines the extent to which mainstream theory is being employed to develop event-specific theory, and to influence the very core practices of event management and event tourism. They introduce the theory, show how it is being used in the events sector through a literature review, incorporate examples and case studies written by researchers and/or practitioners, and contain methods that can be used effectively in the real world. With online resource material, this mix-and-match collection is ideal for lecturers who need theoretical foundations and case studies for their classes, by students in need of reference works, by professionals wanting increased understanding alongside practical methods, and by agencies or associations that want their members and stakeholders to have access to a library of valuable resources. Series editor: Donald Getz PhD., Professor Emeritus, University of Calgary, Canada.

A definitive roadmap for implementing effective supply chain management

Strategic sourcing redefines the traditional approach to buying and using materials and services. Purchasing and supplier programs are receiving substantial attention in current professional literature, but there is little information on implementing supplier strategies and techniques.

Harnessing Value in the Supply Chain offers a specific, step-by-step approach to the strategic sourcing process, developed by the author at Southern California Edison. This unique reference provides expert guidance on designing, launching, executing, evaluating, and maintaining a sourcing project. It includes illustrations, examples, and templates for immediate use. Finally, supply chain management and strategic sourcing are presented in a usable, comprehensive, and cost-effective framework.

To illustrate this approach, the book describes the experience of Southern California Edison, a utility company that achieved $150 million in annual cost reduction through a strategic sourcing program. The story is told from the perspective of the people who led the revolutionary change at SCE, as wellas the suppliers. A detailed method on how to duplicate SCE's success is included in the book.

This book is unique in that it fully traces a strategic sourcing initiative from conception to implementation—and it is the only book that documents the SCE story. Harnessing Value in the Supply Chain is a powerful tool that will help organizations optimize their resources and develop relationships to sustain effective supply chain management.

This is an in-depth look at how to improve decisions on major projects at the concept stage, when there is scant information available. The book describes how to evaluate judgemental information. It looks at how scant information can actually be a strength, and can help establish a broad overall perspective.

This unique book that deals with project communication management in complex environments, taking a leaf from China s experience with a major earthquake in Sichuan, would be a timely contribution to fill this lacuna. Readers would be able to understand how companies and organizations that are unprepared for crisis management would react to their detriment. The lessons provided in this book are the only one of its kind to highlight the lessons for companies and organizations to prepare themselves for successful project communication management through the complexity-informed framework. Although the book is written by two building professionals, the concepts and lessons presented are generic and equally applicable for businesses outside of the construction industry; for example, for airports, resorts, hotels, shipyards, etc."

For professionals striving to achieve communications expertise, this book explains how to energize projects, create momentum, and achieve success by talking and listening to staff members.

The need for enterprise flexibility in an era of rapidly advancing technology, increasing competition, and globalization, is apparent. Flexibility can be thought of as an ability of the enterprise to quickly and efficiently respond to market changes and to bring new products and services quickly to the market place. Beyond this definition, a truly flexible enterprise should proactively change the market through its ability to create new and innovative products and services. The proposed book is intended to provide a conceptual framework of Flexible Enterprise supported by researches/case applications in various types of flexibilities exhibited by a flexible enterprise. The selected papers from a variety of issues concerning the planning and operation of a flexible enterprise are organized into following four parts:

I Enterprise and Strategic Flexibility

II Organizational Flexibility

III Business Process and Information Systems Flexibility

IV Operations Flexibility "

Getting organizations going is one thing. Stopping them is another. This book examines how and why organizations become trapped in disastrous decisions. The focal point is Project Taurus, an IT venture commissioned by the London Stock Exchange and supported by numerous City Institutions. Taurus was intended to transform London's antiquated manual share settlement procedures into a state of the art electronic system that would be the envy of the world. The project collapsed after three year's intensive work and investments totalling almost GBP500 million. This book is an in depth study of escalation in decision making. The author has interviewed a number of people who played a key role and presents a most readable account of what actually happened. At the same time she sets the case in the broader literature of decision making.

Emilia Mendes discusses stepwise regression modelling, care-based reasoning, and classification and regression trees. It will help small web development companies improve their cost estimation process.

When we look at a program or a project, to identify its size in terms of 'large', it would be advisable to consider a few factors that determine the size i.e., effort, uncertainty and complexity involved in delivering the outcome. This book is intended to provide the required lateral thinking in this field of management excellence.

Software effort estimation is a key element of software project planning and management. Yet, in industrial practice, the important role of effort estimation is often underestimated and/or misunderstood. In this book, Adam Trendowicz presents the CoBRA method (an abbreviation for Cost Estimation, Benchmarking, and Risk Assessment) for estimating the effort required to successfully complete a software development project, which uniquely combines human judgment and measurement data in order to systematically create a custom-specific effort estimation model. CoBRA goes far beyond simply predicting the development effort; it supports project decision-makers in negotiating the project scope, managing project risks, benchmarking productivity, and directing improvement activities. To illustrate the method's practical use, the book reports several real-world cases where CoBRA was applied in various industrial contexts. These cases represent different estimation contexts in terms of software project environment, estimation objectives, and estimation constraints. This book is the result of a successful collaboration between the process management division of Fraunhofer IESE and many software companies in the field of software engineering technology transfer. It mainly addresses software practitioners who deal with planning and managing software development projects as part of their daily work, and is also of interest for students or courses specializing in software engineering or software project management.

This book explores how to design and implement planning & control (P&C) systems that can help organizations to manage their growth and restructuring processes in a sustainability perspective. The book is not designed to enable the reader to become an experienced system dynamics modeler; rather, it aims to develop the reader's capabilities to design and implement performance management systems by using a system dynamics approach. More specifically, the book shows how to develop system dynamics models that can better support an understanding of: -What is organizational performance and how to frame and measure it; -How to identify and map the processes underlying performance; -How to design and implement a dynamic performance management system and link it to strategic planning; -How to tie strategic resource dynamics to processes and performance indicators; -How to link strategic resources, and performance indicators to responsibility and incentive systems. Using a dynamic performance management approach can improve an organization's capability to understand and manage the forces driving performance over time, as well as set goals and objectives that may properly and selectively gauge results and match them to the key responsibility areas in the planning process. The dynamic performance management approaches covered in the book are beneficial to performance management analysts, enabling them to frame their professional field within the broader context of the system. The book also includes numerous case studies and dynamic performance management models for providing examples of how dynamic performance management works in practice. In addition, a literature review is included to provide a guideline for further improvements to those readers who wish to develop relevant, specific, and detailed system dynamics modeling skills and to establish the foundation for teaching system dynamics applied to performance management in organizational and inter-organizational contexts. This is particularly relevant for graduate students who have taken system dynamics courses and need to apply their own skills to business and public management.

Agile Practice Guide has been developed as a resource to understand, evaluate, and use agile and hybrid agile approaches. This practice guide provides guidance on when, where, and how to apply agile approaches and provides practical tools for practitioners and organizations wanting to increase agility. This practice guide is aligned with other PMI standards, including A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) sixth edition, and was devel-oped as the result of collaboration between the Project Man-agement Institute and the Agile Alliance.

Covers the entire process of risk management by providing methodologies for determining the sources of engineering project risk, and once threats have been identified, managing them through: identification and assessment (probability, relative importance, variables, risk breakdown structure, etc.); implementation of measures for their prevention, reduction or mitigation; evaluation of impacts and quantification of risks and establishment of control measures. It also considers sensitivity analysis to determine the influence of uncertain parameters values on different project results, such as completion time, total costs, etc. Case studies and examples across a wide spectrum of engineering projects discuss such diverse factors as: safety; environmental impacts; societal reactions; time and cost overruns; quality control; legal issues; financial considerations; and political risk, making this suitable for undergraduates and graduates in grasping the fundamentals of risk management.

An important component of library administration and organization in the modern age is managing projects. Once the realm of technology and business gurus, formal project management tools, techniques and schemas have become more commonplace in libraries. Using formal project management components can help libraries achieve their desired outcomes with less stress for employees. However, there can be an entry barrier to project management, since the concepts are still somewhat out of the range of the usual library administration experience. This volume of Advances in Library Administration and Organization attempts to put project management into the toolboxes of library administrators through overviews of concepts, analyses of experiences, and forecasts for the use of project management within the profession.

Collaborating in virtual teams is a new reality in modern project management and work environments. Its emergence calls for an extensive analysis and re-alignment on the part of organizations, so as to help virtual teams maintain 'strategic momentum' - a concept that this book introduces. Strategic momentum represents perseverance with regard to pursuing a virtual team's strategy; a 'flywheel' concept that drives the team members to concentrate on the project tasks until they have reached their shared goal. The authors present a design science based model, together with an in-depth qualitative study involving eight virtual R&D project teams. In this model, strategic momentum is assessed in terms of empowerment, team task insight, and collective commitment. These three determinants can be promoted and sustained by various contextual factors and interventions on the part of the management. The authors also provide a wealth of practical tips to help practitioners and consultants generate and sustain strategic momentum in their own contexts when working with virtual teams.

There are many myths about Artificial Intelligence (AI) relating to what it is and what it can and cannot do. The people making decisions on AI projects are often not technologically savvy and unable to find easy answers. The spending on and the returns from AI projects are not necessarily straightforward. Part of the reason for this is the lack of understanding of the impact of critical decision criteria. AI touches on many ethical concepts - data privacy, validity, and, more importantly, its potential misuse. AI often replaces human decision-making, as managers do not clearly understand the implications of those choices. This book provides an easy and accessible guide for practitioners without a technological background to understand AI. It guides the reader through the fundamental issues confronting decision-makers. It offers advice on 'how to ask relevant questions' using the 15 decision scales. There is currently no comparable book on the market that acts as a pocketbook management reference guide for the AI layman.

This book discusses how systems thinking and approaches can aid management consultants in navigating the complexities of client advisory in current realities. It thereby brings to the forefront aspects of holism, flexibility and responsibility - the keys to success in today's world. Management consultants are called in to offer an independent expert view of an organisation/ a situation and are expected to address some of the most pressing problems businesses face. The client does not exist in a silo, but in a complex environment that lies at the intersection of a range of internal and external factors that are often unseen and unpredictable. The organisation itself presents an alien territory that the consultant is expected to acclimatise to within a very short period of time, and come up with solutions that "insiders" would not have been able to visualise. The book presents a range of ideas, concepts and reference cases that are relevant and topical for consultants in their daily work. It argues that systems thinking allows holism and flexibility in management consulting - while holism is about the ability to encompass the environmental and organisational complexity, flexibility is about the ability to think creatively and adopt different approaches to accommodate this complexity. With commentaries, case studies, conceptual models and perspectives that cut across multiple industries, sectors and countries, this book is a valuable resource for academics and professionals alike. The book's inner pages and its page on Springer.com contain additional comments providing perspectives of clients, industry experts and academia.

Managing risk is essential for every organization. However, significant opportunities may be lost by concentrating on the negative aspects of risk without bearing in mind the positive attributes. The objective of Project Risk Management: Managing Software Development Risk is to provide a distinct approach to a broad range of risks and rewards associated with the design, development, implementation and deployment of software systems. The traditional perspective of software development risk is to view risk as a negative characteristic associated with the impact of potential threats. The perspective of this book is to explore a more discerning view of software development risks, including the positive aspects of risk associated with potential beneficial opportunities. A balanced approach requires that software project managers approach negative risks with a view to reduce the likelihood and impact on a software project, and approach positive risks with a view to increase the likelihood of exploiting opportunities. Project Risk Management: Managing Software Development Risk explores software development risk both from a technological and business perspective. Issues regarding strategies for software development are discussed and topics including risks related to technical performance, outsourcing, cybersecurity, scheduling, quality, costs, opportunities and competition are presented. Bringing together concepts across the broad spectrum of software engineering with a project management perspective, this volume represents both a professional and scholarly perspective on the topic.

Projects are at the core of all management activities because they directly will contribute to the operational and financial success of the organization. Further, projects are of strategic importance; they are integral to strategic plan and its operationalization. Since sophistication in project management will positively impact the operational profit margin, the desire for sophistication, and the motivation for excellence in project management is almost universal. Independent of the source of the underlying noble motivation, the pace at which an organization achieves that desired sophistication will directly depend on how much time, effort, and support, is dedicated to the enhancement of project management processes, procedures, and tools. A high level of project management sophistication can be an exceptionally advantageous credential for the enterprise, because this credential can be used as a competitive edge for advancing one contractor among the other members of the bidder pool. If an organization has reached a high level of project management maturity, the organization should regard that as a reason for extreme pride among competitors. Even in sophisticated organizations, the transition to virtual projects should be after verifying that there is extensive formality in managing projects, because formalization of project management processes is far more important in virtual teams than it is in traditional teams. Proposals are preludes to externally-funded projects, and portfolios are either collections of projects or collections of proposals. This book describes the attributes, procedures, and policies that reflect sophisticated organizations.

All companies draw on resources outside the business, and have to compete with other enterprises to attract these resources. Standard texts on management and organization argue that the best way to get ahead in business is by getting a firm grasp of this external environment, by 'representing' it internally. Kaj Koskinen claims that this is the wrong approach.
He argues that business knowledge doesn't just represent the world outside the company but is a construction of the company and the people working in it. The success of a company depends less on how clearly it represents the external environment than on factors such as institutional memory, a culture of trust and appropriate organizational mechanisms for learning. In short, the most successful companies are those which are what the author calls autopoietic knowledge systems. In this book, he presents a novel scheme for understanding knowledge creation and learning in project-based enterprises. He shows how autopoietic knowledge systems can be built and the benefits they can bring.
All scholars and students of knowledge management will benefit from the radical new approach to business organization presented in this book. It will also be of great interest to knowledge managers looking to understand how they can drive their businesses forward.