Choosing the right people to carry out a project is essential to its success, and when multiple projects are combined into a complex program, the human aspect becomes even more important. Project and Program Management: A Competency-Based Approach, Fifth Edition balances a complete account of the technical aspects of project and program management with a practical approach to understanding and developing the core competencies required to accomplish desired goals. On the technical side, this book is a complete introduction to predicting costs, setting schedules, and assessing risks. On the human side, it sheds new light on how to mold different personality types into a team, how to motivate the team's members, and how to produce extraordinary results. The author details the blocking and tackling of the program management approach, describing the best way to define, organize, and schedule the work to be done, while identifying risks and controlling costs throughout the process.This fifth edition has been significantly revised, with every chapter updated. The volume considers the magnitude of recent social, political, and technological changes. Included are insights from numerous students who bring to the forefront their current real-world practices from their individual businesses, industries, and disciplines.

In all organizational settings, managing projects is an ever-increasing necessity. Large corporations have departments that institute procedures for implementing and tracking projects, but smaller organizations can also benefit from becoming aware of the steps undertaken in creating a project so they can maximize planned outcomes. Mitchell Springer, an expert in these areas, provides an invaluable guide that details program management in a concise and understandable manner. This succinct reference will be a valuable asset and should be on the desk of anyone involved with the intricate and costly business of program management.

From his years of experience and an exhaustive study of the program planning literature, Mitchell Springer has ascertained that the program planning process is made up of four key elements - program organization planning, schedule planning, cost planning, and performance planning. Program organization planning is the process that establishes the planning and program organizations and the definition of the work to be performed. Schedule planning provides the time frame for resource allocation and establishes a baseline for the current status and forecasts of completion dates for scheduled work. Cost planning established a preliminary budget to use to track and compare against actual costs. Performance planning is the identification and subsequent documentation of the technical performance requirements.The key to understanding and quantifying programs is coming to the realization that program progress is both sequential at the micro-level and nonlinear at the macro-level. The four primary phases of the management process, planning execution, analysis, and adjustment may be performed at the same time because different activities within the program advance at varying rates. However, at the micro level, for example, a needs assessment must be completed before its subsequent end product can be produced. The end products of all additional, sequential steps cannot be generated if this first micro level step, the needs assessment statement, has not been completed. However, work on all macro level steps can proceed without the completion of the initial micro level step. The author also provides several tools to help process evaluation, including sample questionnaires, a research observation form, and data mapping instruments.