Managing Web Projects Part III

Chapter 1 of the book comes before Part I and is intended to be a brief introduction to project management. While it's generally an excellent coverage with lots of useful insights, I'm not sure about the wisdom of trying to introduce project management in such a short chapter. Especially when you give a definition of what a project is that is almost heretical:

A project is a temporary organization to which resources are assigned to undertake a unique, novel and transient endeavour managing the inherent uncertainty and need for integration in order to deliver beneficial change objectives (emphasis mine).

I think the chapter needed more space -- the subject it tries to cover is too big and only very briefly touches on the obligatory discussion of a project life-cycles.

There is a brief discussion on the importance of seeing a project at various levels, and some advise against prematurely planning the lower levels of a project before the higher levels are clearly understood.

His discussion of business objectives are also useful. Business objectives are the reasons why the organization is spending time and resources on the project, and they are different from the project objectives. Only after and if the project gets finished does the business begins to reap the business objectives.

A short and sweet discussion of the difference between cultural objective is also presented. Projects often focus only on the technical objectives ('build and install software') and the cultural objectives ('user training', 'creation of new procedures because of the new software'). This is a good reminder for the project planners.

Some of the valuable insights come from his discussion of project typologies. For example, he presents a typology of a project's importance to the business. Is the project intended to keep the business alive? Is it intended to reposition the business? Is it intended to improve business performance?

Finally there is also a brief discussion on the uniqueness of a project. While linguists may get riled when some things are said to be more unique than others, the world of project management seems to have latched on to the word. Turner presents a typology based in the uniqueness of projects. The classifications range from Runners, which are projects that are very similar to other projects undertaken by the project team, to Repeaters , which are projects common to the organization itself, but not to the project team, to Strangers, which are less familiar to the organization, having undertaken a few similar projects, to Aliens, which are totally new projects. The importance of this typology is that it highlights the risk inherent in the type of project, with Stranger projects bringing the highest risk.

In chapter 2, Turner begins describing what is special with web projects.