Leading High Performance Projects

According to studies by major think tanks, few projects finish on time, within budget, or meet customer requirements. The number one problem, cited by these studies, is a failure on the people side of project management, stemming from ineffective or inadequate leadership. While certainly not the only cause of project failures, exhibiting effective leadership throughout the entire life cycle of any project is key to achieving success. Drawing on the principles and research findings of Organizational Engineering (OE), this book explains how project managers can adopt the most appropriate leadership style under a given set of circumstances. Leading High-Performance Projects helps project managers encourage greater teaming, become more effective decision-makers, reduce incidences of negative conflict, and eliminate opportunities for "negative energy" to permeate a project. The Results--readers will learn how to become more efficient, more effective, more productive, and consequently, more successful project managers.

Key Features:

• Provides the skill set required to effectively address the leading causes of project failure and turn them into project success
• Presents a practical approach for understanding the working styles of people and ways to apply that understanding to significantly improve project performance
• Addresses how creativity, decision making, diversity, globalization, communications, politics, mentoring, conflict management and resolution, facilitation, risk, collaborative learning, active and emphatic listening, delegation, and high-performance teaming contribute to the success of a project
• Identifies ten patterns of behavior and explains how to use them to create a successful and effective team
• Provides case studies, checklists, easy-to-understand graphics, and suggestions for improving situations that challenge even the best project leaders

About the Author

Ralph L. Kliem, President of Practical Creative Solutions, Inc., a firm specializing in management consulting and training, is an accomplished author of hundreds of articles and 12 books primarily in the field of project management. Mr. Kliem is also a senior project manager and former corporate auditor with a Fortune 500 firm and editor of the newsletter for the Puget Sound chapter of PMI.