《Fundamentals of Project Management 4th Edition》读书笔记 第一章 项目管理总览

CHAPTER 1 An Overview of Project Management

项目管理总览

项目失败的一个常见的原因就是缺乏足够的项目计划。人们总是倾向于采用试错的方式去工作，立马着手去工作，但却导致后来的返工，甚至将错就错。

The reason for these failures isconsistently found to be inadequate project planning. People adopt aready-fire-aim approach in an effort to get a job done really fast and end upspending far more time than
necessary by reworking errors, recovering from diversionsdown “blind alleys,” and so on.

直觉和经验的方法往往不可靠。

They want to know whether using goodproject management really reduces the failures and the rework, and I can onlysay you will have to try it and see for yourself. If you can achieve levels ofrework of only
a few percent using a seat-of-the-pants approach to managingprojects, then keep doing what you’re doing! However, I don’t believe you willfind this to be true.

一个常见错误是，项目经理单独为项目组进行计划。这样不仅让计划得不到彻底承认和接纳，而且还会有很多漏洞。PM不可能考虑到所有事情，对任务的估计不准确。项目管理的第一项准则就是让实际实施的人来帮助制定计划。

One mistake made by inexperienced projectmanagers is to plan the project for the team. Not only do they get no buy-in totheir plan, but that plan is usually full of holes. Managers can’t think ofeverything,
their estimates of task durations are wrong, and the entire thingfalls apart after the project is started. The first rule of project managementis that the people who must do the work should help plan it.

PM的角色应该是一个使能者，帮助别人来把工作搞定，为项目组排除干扰，获取需要的资源，为项目组提供支持。

The role of the project manager is that ofan enabler. Her job is to help the team get the work completed, to “run interference”for the team, to get scarce resources that team members need, and to bufferthem
from outside forces that would disrupt the work.

领导力的最好定义是：让别人想要做你要做的事。

The best definition of leadership that Ihave found is the one by Vance Packard, in his book The Pyramid Climbers. Hesays,“Leadership is the art of getting others to
want to do something thatyou believe should be done.” The operative word here is “want.” Dictators getothers to do things that they want done. So do guards who supervise prison workteams. But a leader gets people to want to do the work, and that is asignificant
difference.

进度安排是很重要的事情。但是最重要的是要对项目进行正确的定义，否则其他都只是错上加错。

Scheduling is certainly a major tool usedto manage projects, but it is not nearly as important as developing a sharedunderstanding of what the project is supposed to accomplish or constructing agood work
breakdown structure (WBS) to identify all the work to be done. Infact, without practicing good project management, the only thing a detailedschedule is going to do is allow you to document your failures with greatprecision!

给人们进度安排的软件，却没有进行专门培训是常见的错误。不是所有人都会自动学好这些软件。

The tendency is to give people thescheduling software and expect them to learn how to use it without any training.This simply does not work. The features of scheduling software are such thatmost people don’t
learn the subtleties by themselves. They don’t have the time,because they are trying to do their regular jobs, and not everyone is good atself-paced learning.

如果项目组里只有一个人，则谈不上项目管理，谈不上组织协调、并行工作、关键路径。他所需要的只是良好的自我管理，和一个时间管理软件。

When is managing a project not projectmanagement? When only one person is involved. However, when no one else isworking on the project (including outside vendors), there is no need for acritical path schedule.
A critical path schedule is one that has a number ofparallel paths, and one of them is longer than the others and determines howlong it will take to complete the job or, ultimately, whether the given enddate can be met. When you’re working on a job by yourself,
there aren’t any parallelpaths—unless you are ambidextrous!

One-person projects do require goodself-management, or good time management, but all you need is a good to-dolist, which comes from a task listing. However, unless you are coordinating thework of other people,
you aren’t practicing true project management.

有时PM会被要求做一些项目工作。但这会带来问题，首先项目工作和管理工作会互相干扰。其次，没有办法对PM的项目工作做公平的评判。所以对于大于4人的项目组，最好PM专门做管理协调工作。

It is common to have individuals serve asproject managers and require also that they do part of the actual work in theproject. This is a certain prescription for problems.

Yes, for very small teams—perhaps up tothree or four people—a project manager can do some of the work. But, as teamsizes increase, it becomes impossible to work and manage both, because you areconstantly
being pulled away from the work by the needs of your team members. Oneof the reasons for this situation is that organizations don’t fully understandwhat project management is all about, and they think that it is possible forindividuals to do both.

项目偶然失败的概率要高于偶然成功。正如墨菲定律所说：有可能出错的地方就会出错。

There is a higher probability that thingswill accidentally go wrong in a project than that they will accidently goright. In terms of cost estimates, this means that there is always a higherlikelihood that
the budget will be overrun than that the project will come inbelow budget. This is just another way of stating Murphy’s law, that“whatever cango wrong will go wrong.”

每个项目都开始于一个概念，概念具有模糊的特性，项目组在进行任何实质性工作前要将项目定义清楚，而且大家要有一致的vision。否则就会出问题。

In my model, you will notice that everyproject begins as a concept, which is always “fuzzy,” and that the project teammust formalize the definition of the job before doing any work. However, becauseof our
ready-fire-aim mentality, we often start working on the job withoutensuring that we have a proper definition or that the mission and vision for thejob are shared by everyone. This invariably leads to major problems as the projectprogresses.

定义不清楚的项目就像一只没有头的鸡，到处乱跑，最后倒下。

Project management is solving a problem ona large scale, and the way you define a problem determines how you will solveit. If you have the wrong definition, you may come up with the right solution—tothe wrong
problem!

In fact, I have become convinced thatprojects seldom fail at the end. Rather, they fail at the definition stage. Icall these projects headless-chicken projects because they are like the chickenthat has had
its head chopped off and runs around spewing blood everywherebefore it finally falls over and is “officially” dead.

定义清楚后，就可以着手开始计划了。涉及到三方面：策略、战术和后勤。

Once the project is defined, you can planhow to do the work. There are three components to the plan: strategy, tactics,and logistics.

当偏差发生后，要采取纠正性措施使项目回归正轨，若不能，则更改计划并获得批准，新计划就成为新的基准，用于项目跟踪。

When deviations from the plan occur,corrective action is taken to get the project back on track, or, if this is notpossible, the plan is changed and approved, and the revised plan becomes thenew baseline
against which progress is tracked.　　　　　　　　　

　　　　　　　　　　

工作结束后，收尾阶段需要对项目进行回顾总结，经验和教训可以应用于未来的项目。两个问题需要问：我们哪方面做的好？下次还有哪里可以改进？注意不是说：哪里做错了？这样问会使人们处于防备状态，从而隐藏一些事情，从而防止别惩罚。

When all the work has been completed, thecloseout phase requires that a review of the project be conducted. The purposeis to learn lessons from this job that can be applied to future ones.

Two questions are asked: “What did we dowell?” and “What do we want to improve next time?”

Notice that we don’t ask what was donewrong. This question tends to make people defensive, and they try to hidethings that may result in their being punished.　

没有总结经验教训，以后就会重复错误。

Failing to do a lessons-learned reviewmeans that future projects will likely suffer the same headaches encountered onthe one just done. It has been said that the organizations that survive andthrive in the
future will be those that learn faster than their competitors. Thisseems especially true for projects.

　　　　　　　　

Most of the time the problem is caused by therebeing no planning! The team simply tries to “wing it,” to do the work withoutdoing any planning at all.　　　　　　　　

人们常花时间进行计划，但碰到困难和变化后，就将原来的计划抛弃。一旦你这样做，你就不能对项目进行控制。

Itis amazing to find that teams often spend time planning a project, then abandonthe plan as soon as they encounter some difficulty. Once they do this, theycannot have control of the work, since without a
plan there is no control. Thekey is to either take corrective action to get back on track with the originalplan or to revise the plan to show where the project is at present and continueforward from that point.

控制就是将现在的工作与计划进行对比，看两者之间的偏差，若有偏差，则采取措施纠正。很小的偏差可以不用去管，但一旦偏差达到一定阈值，则需要关注。

Control is exercised by comparing whereproject work is to where it is supposed to be, then taking action to correctfor any deviations from target. Naturally, small deviations are always presentand are ignored
unless they exceed some pre-established threshold or show atrend toward drifting further off course.

项目集成管理保证项目被合理计划、执行和控制，包括进行变更控制。

Project integration management ensures thatthe project is properly planned, executed, and controlled, including theexercise of formal project change control.

项目失败的一个原因是为项目设定了一个非常紧的截止时间，但牺牲了质量。质量保证在流程上来确保项目质量，质量控制对比结果，看是否符合需求。

One cause of project failure is that qualityis overlooked or sacrificed so that a tight deadline can be met. It is not veryhelpful to complete a project on time, only to discover that the thingdelivered won’t
work properly! Project quality management includes both qualityassurance (planning to meet quality requirements) and quality control (stepstaken to monitor results to see if they conform to requirements).