Lessons in Project Management: How Projects Can Go Right or Wrong Examples from Global Companies [article]

Firend Alan Rasch
2022 Zenodo  
This body of work is part of forthcoming book on project simplified management. This work introduces readers, students of project management and practitioners to a number of global companies and projects, that went right and/or wrong. The idea for the book arose while teaching project management as a component information systems management to M.B.A. students. Most M.B.A. students are working professionals, with the desire to learn not only the principles of project management, but to gain
more » ... ience through the examination of case studies. I got the opportunity to work with numerous companies while consulting on variety of projects and industries. Seeing high percentage of projects failure, mounting to billions of lost revenues annually to companies on global bases, the idea to put together this body of work was born. While the lessons are significantly useful to the public and can be shared, the primary objective of this book however, remains to present the reader with lessons learnt from not only mine, but the collective experience of working with projects. Interestingly, while teaching the cases covered in this book amongst others, I found that certain lessons stuck in students' minds for whatever reasons. Some of these lessons for instance includes the following; It is very good idea to initiate an innovative approach to a project, but the most important thing, is to plan for it adequately, extensively, and be ready for failures and obstacles since nothing goes as you plan. Before planning, a project manager needs to have full understanding of all the variables, concerned parties, tools, information, risk assessment, requirements, and resources of the outcome (deliverables), so that planning and implementation can be done appropriately. Another practical intake of this book is that the execution team in a given project must have a real-time communications and follow-up mechanism for monitoring and control to take real-time corrective actions, as unforeseen factors inevitably cause things to go wrong across a [...]
doi:10.5281/zenodo.5982293 fatcat:5wzicvpbq5f6tdhlmd5sdar5oq