Project Leadership: Creating Value With an Adaptive Project Organization

Look around your organization: can you identify who owns project management? Would that person appreciate that they own responsibility for your projects? Project Leadership: Creating Value with an Adaptive Project Organization highlights the importance of these questions—underlining the importance not only of the project team but on the culture of executive leadership to the success of projects. It offers straight-forward takeaways and solutions to provide executives with the tools to implement an effective project environment.

The book begins with a discussion of the project environment and what it means for a project to succeed or fail in today’s world. It introduces the Adaptive Project Management Model followed by a review of the systems and tools that give firms increasing ability to maintain priority on strategic projects and manage their associated uncertainty. Working through the book, you can progressively apply tactics from each chapter to increase your project leadership capability and improve your process so that your projects adapt as required depending on the nature of the portfolio itself.

Ask yourself this—what is my customer buying? What do they really want? The one element that all organizations have in common is that customers are buying execution, and not much else. Therefore, ultimately, this book is about execution—getting things done and making things happen. It details methods and tactics that help you execute projects more effectively and give your organization the edge in the current, fast-paced marketplace.

Barry Cross’ career spans over 25 years of industry, teaching and consulting experience. He joined Queen’s University in 2006 after spending 18 years in various Executive and Management positions with Magna International, Autosystems Manufacturing and DuPont. While in Industry, Mr. Cross led many key strategic initiatives, including the development of significant projects in Asia, Brazil, Mexico, and Europe.

Mr. Cross now teaches at Queen’s School of Business at the Undergraduate and Graduate levels in Operations Management, Service Management, and Project Management. At the Executive level, he speaks regularly on Lean, Innovation, Execution, Operations and Project Management. His speaking and consulting clients include Deloitte, Samsung, Encana and others.

He has an MBA from Queen’s University and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Waterloo. He has published numerous articles and is quoted widely in radio, television and the written media. He is the bestselling author of Lean Innovation: Understanding What’s Next in Today’s Economy (Taylor and Francis, 2012).

Kathryn Brohman’s career started as a marketing manager with Sun Microsystems of Canada. She went on to pursue her Ph.D. in information systems at the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario where she spent four years working with systems development teams both at the university as well as with organizations including Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation, and the Bank of Montreal.

Dr. Brohman is now an Associate professor at Queen’s School of Business. Her leading edge research focuses on enabling business strategy with technology with a specific focus on project governance and control and IT-enabled resilient organizational design. She has published her work in premier journals including the Decision Sciences, Harvard Business Review, MIS Quarterly Executive, and Communications of the ACM.

Kathryn’s primary teaching interests are strategy execution, project leadership, project management and IT-enabled service innovation. She regularly collaborates with organizations by providing assessment and coaching to improve organizational project management and leadership capabilities.

She has worked with a number of organizations on PMO design and enabling other formal mechanisms adaptive project control including Cargill, Empire Financial, Butterball Farms Inc., Access Copyright, and Queen’s University.