Perspectives on Projects

by J. Rodney Turner, Martina Huemann, Frank T. Anbari

Modern project management had its genesis in the field of operations research in the late 1940s, but today it is a much more diverse subject. It has evolved and developed a much wider range of methods, techniques, and skills that the project manager can draw upon.Not all these skills are relevant to every project, but an assortment of them will be relevant to most. This book aims to describe for students, researchers and managers the full range of skills that project managers can use to develop their methodologies.The authors group the skills into nine perspectives, representing nine schools of project management research and theory. By attaching a metaphor to each of these perspectives, students, researchers and managers are better able to understand each approach and decide whether it is best suited to the development of a strategy for managing their project.Perspectives on Projects builds upon the various theoretical orientations that the field of project management has developed. Featuring several case studies, drawn from a variety of settings, to illustrate how the different schools can provide different perspectives on projects, this book is an ideal text for anyone involved in project management.

368 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 3, 2010

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Rodney Turner is Professor of Project Management at the Lille School of Management, France and at the Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick, Ireland. He has also authored or edited thirteen books, written numerous articles for journals, conferences and magazines and is editor of The International Journal of Project Management.

Reviews

[Jens Rinnelt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors provide a holistic perspective of the field of project management. You get the impression they know their field well, although the starting point is in academics and a practicioner has to think for their own how to apply specific methods or perspectives in their own project. But I believe that is exactly the whole point of the book. The authors provide 9 different perspectives, which essentially represent different schools of thought within the field of project management. Explaining these perspectives and what to focus on within that perspective can be stimulating for your own project situation.
(Four stars because academia and its scientific approach is per definition reactive, using case studies to understand how things worked in retroperspective, instead of focusing on how things should be and what the tools and methods to reach those desired states are. Thus the book is descriptive and normative in nature. Good for understanding the topic, but how to apply it is your own responsibility!)