Effective Project Management: Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme, Fourth Edition

Part II. Adaptive Project Framework

Project management is at a major crossroads. How we choose to go forward will either endear us to our clients or give them more reasons to dismiss project management as irrelevant to their needs. Changes that have taken place in the past few years in the way businesses operate have given us good reason to pause and reflect on whether or not our traditional approach to project management still satisfies the needs of organizations. It is my belief that we are not meeting the needs of contemporary organizations and that we must do something to correct that deficiency. This question has dominated my thinking for several years now. I've had this feeling that the business world is passing us by, and that what we are offering them isn't up to expectations. It's time for some outside-of-the-box thinking.

Part II of this book arose out of that belief and the need to act. I call this new approach the Adaptive Project Framework (APF). It reflects my thinking on an approach to projects that does not fit the traditional project profile. Much of the APF is the direct result of working with project managers who are frustrated with their foiled attempts to adapt TPM to projects for which it was not designed. I warn you now that what you are going to read about in Part II is different. I ask you to be open-minded as you read these chapters. What I have done is take parts from the traditional approach and parts from the extreme approach and integrated them in a ...