Books

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A Practical Guide to Earned Value Project Management

Now you don’t have to know accounting to understand and reap the benefits of earned value project management. In one convenient resource, “A Practical Guide to Earned Value Project Management” spells out everything you need to know to use this highly effective project management tool. First you’ll get an overview of the earned value management system (EVMS) and how it’s used. Then you’ll take a look at the 32 criteria – and learn how each corresponds with successful project management. Next, you’ll move through the lifecycle of a sample project to see how the components of the earned value system are applied. Along the way, you’ll learn how to: interpret and use the earned value management system to manage your projects; compute variances that are more meaningful to project owners and project teams; design reports and graphs with more valuable information; address unfavorable earned value metrics; and compare projects to better understand which ones are doing well, which are in trouble, and which need to go.

Enterprise Governance and Enterprise Engineering

Achieving enterprise success necessitates addressing enterprises in ways that match the complexity and dynamics of the modern enterprise environment. However, since the majority of enterprise strategic initiatives appear to fail – among which those regarding information technology – the currently often practiced approaches to strategy development and implementation seem more an obstacle than an enabler for strategic enterprise success. Two themes underpin the fundamentally different views outlined in this book. First, the competence-based perspective on governance, whereby employees are viewed as the crucial core for effectively addressing the complex, dynamic and uncertain enterprise reality, as well as for successfully defining and operationalizing strategic choices. Second, enterprise engineering as the formal conceptual framework and methodology for arranging a unified and integrated enterprise design, which is a necessary condition for enterprise success.

Advances in Government Enterprise Architecture

Over the past two decades, the government sector has emerged as the area of largest implementation of enterprise architecture – a critical success factor for all types, scales, and intensities of e-government programs. Advances in Government Enterprise Architecture is a seminal publication in the emerging and evolving discipline of enterprise architecture (EA). Presenting current developments, issues, and trends in EA, this critical resource provides IT managers, government CIOs, researchers, educators, and professionals with insights into the impact of effective EA on IT governance, IT portfolio management, and IT outsourcing, creating a must-have holding for academic libraries and organizational information centers.

Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World

Today’s leading authority on the subject of this text is the author, MIT Standish Professor of Management and Director of the System Dynamics Group, John D. Sterman. Sterman’s objective is to explain, in a true textbook format, what system dynamics is, and how it can be successfully applied to solve business and organizational problems. System dynamics is both a currently utilized approach to organizational problem solving at the professional level, and a field of study in business, engineering, and social and physical sciences.

Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology, and Its Use Practitioners, Teachers and Students

From the father of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), Peter Checkland, comes a new, accessible text which clearly and concisely looks at SSM. The book leaves out all of the development detail and historical/intellectual material which can be found in Checkland’s other classic works, but contains the practical essentials that will allow teachers to teach SSM accurately and students to learn it with real understanding.

Brain of the Firm

This is the second edition of a book (originally published in 1972) which has already become a management ‘standard’ both in universities and on the bookshelves of managers and their advisers. Brain of the Firm develops an account of the firm based upon insights derived from the study of the human nervous system, and is a basic text from the author′s theory of viable systems. Despite the neurophysiology, the book is written for managers to understand.