Hi, PPers.

I hope you will forgive my absence from this wonderful forum over the past several months. I have been immersed in writing my new book: about 300 pages of text plus 89 diagrams. Having sent the complete manuscript for Managing Projects as Investments: Earned Value to Business Value to my publisher, CRC Press, yesterday, I now expect to be back here far more often.

I would be happy to chat about the topics I covered in the book, if anyone has questions. Obviously, you won't know exactly what I said until it comes out, sometime this summer. But I can give a thumbnail for anyone who is interested.

I believe that a substantial portion of the problems that PM currently faces have to do with an incorrect definition of what a project really is, and with sponsor/customers who have never been trained to be sponsor/customers and therefore fall back on anachronistic and destrutive methods like arbitrary deadlines and emaciating budgets.

This book recommends a new paradigm for projects: instead of a blind march to a calendar-driven delivery, a thoughtful investment with decisions and contracts based in optimized business value and profit. It is intended for project managers and team members but also, most notably, for executives and senior managers: those who oversee and sponsor projects and whose goal is their business value.

This book covers my innovative scheduling metric, critical path drag, but also its corollaries: drag cost, true cost, resource availability drag (RAD) and the cost of leveling with unresolved bottlenecks (the CLUB). It shows how to compute them and how to use them to rightsize staffing levels both for a project and for an organization.

It also devotes two chapters to earned value techniques, both basic and advanced, that explain in succinct form exactly what every project manager and sponsor/customer needs to know about earned value: its uses, its abuses, its value, its distortions and its potential fixes. And it shows how to extend these metrics to indexing, tracking, progressing and improving the project's business value.

So if anyone has any questions about any of this, I am feeling energized and immersed enough in these subjects to want to chat.

Fraternally in project management,

Steve the Bajan