The Project Management Institute: Project Management Handbook

Reviewed by LTC Kenneth H. Rose (USA, Ret.), a Project Manager with the Waste Policy Institute in San Antonio, TX, and a former member of the Army Acquisition Corps.

Contemporary concepts of project management reflect a more integrated approach than those of times past. Embracing this new view, The Project Management Institute: Project Management Handbook, edited by Jeffrey K. Pinto, is the vanguard of a body of literature that will surely follow.

Pinto's text is indeed a fundamentally new approach to presenting a project management handbook. Its four-part structure of basics, techniques, people, and integration is a bold break from the collections of essentially stand-alone topics that are characteristic of previous handbooks.

The book gets off to a strong start in Part I with a comprehensive discussion of key issues in project management. Elements such as configuration management, preplanned product improvements, and integrated logistics support will be familiar to military readers. New areas of interest include integrating training in project operations and refining industry metrics for quantifying performance improvements.

One of the most insightful chapters addresses "black boxes" in project management; that is, the areas of preand postproject activity that are often less understood than the intervening project operations. The chapter suggests that projects begin with conceptualization and decoupling and end with learning and recoupling. It provides a framework for linking these four elements across the life of the project.

Part II begins with a solid foundation on scope management that leads into a discussion of alternate financial means for selecting and evaluating projects. Risk management receives complete coverage that includes methodologies for application in practice.

Several chapters discuss the interaction of work breakdown structures (WBS) with network tools such as Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) and Critical Path Method (CPM) in planning and scheduling. The text focuses on understanding these tools, not just the how-to of their application. An abbreviated WBS model that moves the work package, the basic element of project execution, toward the top of the hierarchy is suggested as more applicable to small projects than the six-level DOD model. PERT and CPM are considered in great detail, from their basic attributes and differences down to the method of calculating and using values within the network. Part II concludes appropriately with guidance for closing out a project.

Part III is the unique contribution of this text, discussing the many aspects of human resources in project management. A practical view of power and politics is followed by extensive coverage of team building, crossfunctional cooperation, leadership, and motivation. The chapter on negotiation is critical, considering that many projects are performed through matrix organizations in which leaders have limited directive authority and must depend on willful cooperation of others. A chapter on conflict management gets to the heart of an issue that has great power for improving project performance, but is often misunderstood as unpleasant and a negative indicator of managerial performance.

Part IV presents integrative issues, including a prescription of 10 critical success factors. A highly informative discussion of four typical failures in project management provides a strong finish for the book. In a clearly iconoclastic view, the author suggests that both CPM and earned value management fail the project manager in their own failure to consider rework in their internal calculations. The author points out the dangers of adding people late in a project to gain earlier completion. And he candidly condemns the practice of adding managerial pressure in an effort to meet the schedule. Pinto closes Part IV with a view of project management as the key to success in the markets and economies of tomorrow's world.

Project Management Handbook is something of an educational sandwich. It has a strong start, a strong finish, and a middle that is chock-full of useful information. Because of its integrated approach, the reader would be well advised to start here, then fill in with augmenting detail from other sources under the "handbook" name.