The Art of Project Management (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly))

Book Description

The Art of Project Management covers it all--from practical methods for making sure work gets done right and on time, to the mindset that can make you a great leader motivating your team to do their best. Reading this was like reading the blueprint for how the best projects are managed at Microsoft... I wish we always put these lessons into action!" --Joe Belfiore, General Manager, E-home Division, Microsoft Corporation

"Berkun has written a fast paced, jargon-free and witty guide to what he wisely refers to as the 'art' of project management. It's a great introduction to the discipline. Seasoned and new managers will benefit from Berkun's perspectives." --Joe Mirza, Director, CNET Networks (Cnet.com)

"Most books with the words 'project management' in the title are dry tomes. If that's what you are expecting to hear from Berkun's book, you will be pleasantly surprised. Sure, it's about project management. But it's also about creativity, situational problem-solving, and leadership. If you're a team member, project manager, or even a non-technical stakeholder, Scott offers dozens of practical tools and techniques you can use, and questions you can ask, to ensure your projects succeed." --Bill Bliss, Senior VP of product and customer experience, expedia.com

In The Art of Project Management, you'll learn from a veteran manager of software and web development how to plan, manage, and lead projects. This personal account of hard lessons learned over a decade of work in the industry distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice. Inspiring, funny, honest, and compelling, this is the book you and your team need to have within arms reach. It will serve you well with your current work, and on future projects to come.

Topics include:

How to make things happen
Making good decisions
Specifications and requirements
Ideas and what to do with them
How not to annoy people
Leadership and trust
The truth about making dates
What to do when things go wrong

Customer Reviews:

real world pm.......2007-06-29

An easy and fun to read book, based on real life examples and experiences. While reading it, I got many tips from the book and apply them in my onw work.

project management with your feet on the ground and your heart on it.......2007-05-24

I really love this book!! I've read many books about how to run projects, to keep teams motivated, to be an effective leader, and I think this book compiles all of the above, plus it gives you a grounded point of view. There are no promises, only hard work and ways to improve your performance.
I've used some of the recommendations included in chapter 13: How to make things happen and, although is not a guarantee of success, I have accomplished some of my most difficult projects with it and the ones I didn't, at least I know why.
[...].

highly practical and thorough coverage.......2007-05-12

Reading this book is almost as good as having a highly experienced mentor help you manage a project. The book provides very thorough coverage with sound, practical advice. There is a good list of reference material as well. I have been a software developer for more than 25 years and have managed several projects and still found I learned a lot from this book. I wish it had been available years ago. The book also provided confirmation for many of my beliefs about which I disagree with my current project manager. I hope to use this book to help convince him to change. I will be managing my own project again soon and plan to use use this book to help me succeed. Every software developer should read this book even if they are not a project manager. My only very slight criticism is that the book is most helpful to software product projects, but I think even internal development projects should be run as this book explains.

Great book.......2007-05-09

This is a great book.
Filled with real-world wisdom, it prepares you for what to expect in the world of project management as a career option.
Especially usefull for people from software development background.

Best book I've found on Project Management.......2007-03-14

This is an O'Reilly publication, although it lacks their characteristic animal on the cover. It is a fabulous book. While most Project Management books focus on helping you pass the PMI test, this book is focused on real life and has extensive chapters on dealing with difficult situations and so-called "difficult people".

Effective Training: Systems, Strategies and Practices (3rd Edition)

Average customer rating:

Just the facts, ma'am...

Effective Training: Systems, Strategies and Practices (3rd Edition)
Nick P Blanchard , and James Thacker
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0131860119

Book Description

This practical, reader-friendly book discusses training and how it relates to business objectives and strategies. Using a model of the training process to assist readers in understanding the training process, it emphasizes the value of developing training programs, with examples provided for both large and small organizations, relating training to the overall strategy of a firm. This book provides comprehensive coverage of such topics as the role of training in organizations; training in large and small businesses; strategic planning; human resources departments and their role in supporting strategy; theories of learning and their application; needs analysis; training design; training methods; training development and implementation; and training evaluation. For Human Resources Department managers and staff, trainers, project managers, business strategists, and team trainers and team developers.

Customer Reviews:

Just the facts, ma'am..........2002-02-07

I'm currently using this as a college textbook. It's taken me three weeks to work through three chapters. After two weeks, I ended up skimming over the 2nd and 3rd chapters just to make it through without stopping 4 or 5 times wondering what it was I was reading. I can see it's loaded with important information, but it's an effort to stay focused. The headings and subheadings are bland and repetitive. I often feel like I'm rereading a section, but how can I tell when sections I've read aren't memorable? The authors also show a knack for stating the obvious. For instance, "Identifying the required KSAs is not as obvious, but they are still relatively easy to obtain, by examining each task and asking the question, 'What knowledge, skills, and/or attitudes are necessary to perform a particular task?'" (p.143).

Book Description

This book explains digital branding and how to implement it in the current marketplace.

Download Description

This book explains digital branding and how to implement it in the current marketplace.

Customer Reviews:

DOUG MILLSTIEN IS OUT OF THIS WORLD .......2007-08-07

This person cant write if his life depended on it, i read it and now used it for a door stop. I wouldnt recommend this to anyone. I might use it if hes lucky for my son to sit on at the dinner table.

Setting your brand on fire........2001-06-09

There are so many books on the market that discuss the concept of 'brand' from so many different points of view, that it's difficult to sort out the good from the bad. This is one of the good ones.

Moon and Millison define the basic concepts around brand. They explain in clear buzzword-light language what influences the growth and positioning of a brand. Finally, they provide ample and well-explained pointers to further reading to help understand some of their basic ideas more clearly.

As a consultant working for a systems integrator, one of the things that impressed me the most was the focus on execution. Many books about branding seem to imply that the technical details are irrelevant to brand success, but _Firebrands_ makes the point that a relationship with a customer only has brand value when supported by appropriate policies, training, and technical infrastructure. This is a message that can't be, IMO, repeated often enough.

Well worth the time to read.

my review.......2001-03-08

I have read Firebrands and found it extremely useful. As a systems integrator in St. Louis, I have used this book to help my clients understand the importance of a technical infrastructure in building a vibrant brand.... Mind you, this is not a 60 second brand manager book.

Not Hype! A System for Reality...and innovation........2001-03-05

Firebr@nds is not a bedside book, it's a cookbook, a tool for being AT CAUSE when it comes to building successful, powerful communications for the internet.

As a Technology Interface Architect , the building of brand into the interaction of the product is vital to it's success.

My clients over the past 12 years have been besieged by what appears to them this mysterious thing out there that will grow over some process, that we will somehow invoke, and it will be successful if the powers that be are on our side.

This book makes it all very clear, while eliciting sympathy for all of us who have built brands. A genuine appreciation for its complexity is gained as you read a systemization of brandbuilding in Firebr@ands.

Moon has given us a thorough and deep taxonomy for building the brand from many different pragmatic angles. The dramatic distinctions in language make it easy to use the language as a tool in any company when it comes to educating organizations in building brand.

This is a book that I will return to over and over again as I help my clients grow their products into the future. It was a very brave, and necessary book to write. BRAVO!!!!

Beyond the Frontiers - A genetic approach to the Brand.......2001-03-01

As the Chief Technical Officer of a Texas based e-services and print communication firm, I live in this interactive brandspace on a daily basis. The problem with this brave new world of pixels is simply that much is said and much is written but little intelligent communication occurs. I find the innovative and far reaching approach taken by Michael Moon to be the de facto foundation for the next "big thing".

The approach that one must take to these new media spaces and channels is not readily discernible from the clearly defined trails blazed in the more traditional areas of branding. This new territory is as different as the Earth is from the Moon [no pun intended]. The book travels beyond the areas marked as "unknown - there be dragons here" and opens a clear and understandable path into formerly mysterious areas.

What we need out here in the field is less hype and more substance. Firebrands is a rational, ground breaking treatise on the evolution of Branding. This is a pivotal work that serves as a wonderful deskside companion, as indispensible to me as my spell checker or my browser.

Michaels' best practices mental evolution from the time of the Jeff Martin led Digital Brand Building Seminars of the mid-90's to this opus show an extraordinary depth and breadth of thought and research . The Firebrands book is the Gray's Anatomy of Brand "science".

As my company moves forward with ground breaking, market defining services in the area of brand guaranty we will continue to consult the Firebrands roadmap. We anxiously await any follow-up materials that might come from this mind trust.

Book Description

Transactional Information Systems is the long-awaited, comprehensive work from leading scientists in the transaction processing field. Weikum and Vossen begin with a broad look at the role of transactional technology in today's economic and scientific endeavors, then delve into critical issues faced by all practitioners, presenting today's most effective techniques for controlling concurrent access by multiple clients, recovering from system failures, and coordinating distributed transactions.

The authors emphasize formal models that are easily applied across fields, that promise to remain valid as current technologies evolve, and that lend themselves to generalization and extension in the development of new classes of network-centric, functionally rich applications. This book's purpose and achievement is the presentation of the foundations of transactional systems as well as the practical aspects of the field what will help you meet today's challenges.

* Provides the most advanced coverage of the topic available anywhere--along with the database background required for you to make full use of this material.
* Explores transaction processing both generically as a broadly applicable set of information technology practices and specifically as a group of techniques for meeting the goals of your enterprise.
* Contains information essential to developers of Web-based e-Commerce functionality--and a wide range of more "traditional" applications.
* Details the algorithms underlying core transaction processing functionality.

Customer Reviews:

A wonderfully written book on an important topic.......2004-12-22

Database concurrency control and recovery is one of pinnacles of computer science. An amazing collection of models, theoretical results, and implementation techniques enable thousands of users to simultaneously pound on a large database implemented on unreliable disks and networks, with full confidence that their data will be correctly stored. This book tells how this miracle is accomplished.

I teach database systems and also do research on databases, including systems-level refinements to concurrency control and recovery algorithms. This book has been invaluable to me in understanding the three major aspects of concurrency control in databases: the beautiful theory, the carefully constructed algorithms, and the specifics of the practice.

When this book first came out two years ago, I read most of it over a period of an intense week. That was such an enjoyable experience, because the book is very well structured and written in a smooth yet careful style. The authors ensured that all required concepts were in place before introducing a new concept. And the prose just flows, rendering difficult concepts understandable through well-chosen examples.

Since then I have referred to this book often with specific questions that arose in my research. Each time, my question has been answered fully in the book.

Each chapter ends with a section entitled "Lessons Learned" which summarizes the key ideas of the chapter and just as importantly, states the practical application of each concept. Some concepts have not yet been realized in practice; the authors are up front about this and explain why.

Mike Tarrani's review does a good job of explaining the similarities and differences between this book and the other seminal book on transaction processing, by Jim Gray and Andreas Reuter. Both books have their place, and both should be on the shelf (and read by!) all those who want to understand transaction processing at a deep level. And I agree with Jim Gray who noted in his foreword to the Weikum/Vossen book that it is likely to become (indeed, has) the standard reference in this field.

Very Very Good.......2003-10-06

Exceptionally clear writing. Encyclopedic in its coverage of transactions. Anyone dealing with transactions (not just DB developers) would find this a very valuable resource. If you need a book on transactions, this should be your first choice.

A must for serious DB professionals.......2002-10-06

Tradicionally, the 'transaction' concept is always discussed at the RDBMS classes in the University. But this book goes FAR BEYOND this wide known implementation; with a solid math foundation (some math required, specially set theory and algorithms ) it shows you there are a lot of 'real-life' transactions that requiere some formal methods for defining their implementation.

This book has no discussion or topic regarding any comercial vendor technologies (specially databases), and I think this is very good. The Page and Object models for transaction processing are clearly explained. There's a very nice discussion concerning RAID technologies.

This is not an 'academic' book in all the sense of the word. It can help IT professionals to make better transactional system desing (databases, workflow,e-business,etc).

I would like some RDBMS vendors will include this kind of theory in their documentation....

Up-to-date ... sends an old friend into semi-retirement.......2002-07-05

Before this book was published my primary reference and personal favorite TP book was "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques" by Jim Gray and Andreas Reuter. At over 1100 pages that book thoroughly covered the basics and drilled down into the nuances of transaction processing in a way unmatched by other books on the topic since it was first published in 1993.

This book changes that by going far beyond transaction processing. It starts with the same fundamentals as the older book, and even covers many of the same topics, such as concurrency control, but it addresses each topic from a much wider perspective. For example, the discussion of concurrency goes far beyond the issues of transaction processing as a middleware component. It extends into application, database and search issues. Another indication that this book is more up-to-date is the material on queue managers. While they are at the opposite end of the spectrum from transaction processing monitors, they are integral to any discussion of transactional information systems. More importantly, both transaction processing monitors and queue managers are used in modern enterprise architectures. Having both topics discussed in great detail is a major point in this book's favor.

Personally I intend to keep my copy of the older "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques" because it does cover some of the subject matter more deeply. However, this book has replaced it as my principal reference and if I had to choose between them this is the one I'd go with.

Entrepreneur's Notebook: Practical Advice for Starting a New Business Venture
Average customer rating:

Nice Guide for Beginners

A Must-Have for Entrepreneurs

Exellent Book

Brief and to the point

Invaluable advice for the budding entrepreneur

Entrepreneur's Notebook: Practical Advice for Starting a New Business Venture
Steven K. Gold
Manufacturer: Learning Ventures Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Start Your Own Business (4th Ed.) (Start Your Own)

What No One Ever Tells You about Starting Your Own Business: Real-Life Start-Up Advice from 101 Successful Entrepreneurs (What No One Ever Tells You About Starting Your Own Business)

ASIN: 0976279045

Book Description

Entrepreneur's Notebook propels you on a whirlwind tour of the start-up process. It is an invaluable reference for new and experienced entrepreneurs that includes chapters on a wide range of topics, from entrepreneurial team building to business plans to financing. This excellent book provides an incredible amount of practical information that will help you make smarter decisions and avoid costly mistakes. The author, Steven K. Gold, is an accomplished entrepreneur who has co-founded and led five early-stage ventures. As an investor and mentor, he also advises many entrepreneurs and young companies. He earned his B.S.E. in Entrepreneurial Management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and his M.D. from Brown University Medical School.

Customer Reviews:

Nice Guide for Beginners.......2007-06-16

The author writes a nice overview of the entrepreneurial process. It's basically for novices but it does a good job for this audience. The only problem I have with this book is that it is too basic and is therefore non-unique because it is so low-level. Regardless, I must say that for the right audience, it does a fine job over giving the big picture.

If you are advanced or aspire to become advanced, I would recommend "The Startup Company Bible for Entrepreneurs" but only for high-tech entrepreneurs. Even this author has recommended it.

A Must-Have for Entrepreneurs.......2007-05-14

Steven gives great illustrations to drive home his insightful advice for entrepreneurs. As he's "been there, done that," we can take his advice to heart in the hopes of becoming a success like him!

Exellent Book.......2007-05-11

Great book for getting ready to open a new business. Would refer to anyone thinking about opening a business.

Brief and to the point.......2007-04-27

This is a delightful little book that contains a wealth of useful and helpful information and ideas on starting a small business and ensuring that it is viable and succesful. The book is well written and easy to follow and interesting to read.

This is a must read for entrepreneurs, particularly budding ones as the information the book provides is very practical and can help you avoid making costly errors. The book covers a wide range of topics including the start-up process, marketing the business on a small budget, cash-flow forecasting, among other things.

The book is an excellent companion for the entrepreneur that is well worth having.

Invaluable advice for the budding entrepreneur.......2007-03-04

This book does a terrific job of presenting some of the most important issues entrepreneurs face when embarking on new ventures, touching on topics such as the business plan, funding, team building, and cash flows. Using simple, yet stunningly accurate models of the entrepreneurial process, Steven Gold distills complex subjects into simple, practical, take-away messages. The classification of entrepreneurial personalities (professionals, pragmatists, and inventors) is something I think we can all relate to. I find the metaphor which compares building a new company to making "stone soup" equally compelling. There are countless books out there for budding entrepreneurs, but this one is no fluff. It gets right down to the nuts and bolts so you can concentrate on your business.

Collaborative Web Development: Strategies and Best Practices for Web Teams

Average customer rating:

Good Project Management is Good Project Management
Very outdated
This book really doesn't tell you much of anything.
Excellent for all Web Project Managers
good introductory treatment

Collaborative Web Development: Strategies and Best Practices for Web Teams
Jessica Burdman
Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0201433311

Amazon.com

In her introduction to Collaborative Web Development: Strategies and Best Practices for Web Teams, author Jessica Burdman quotes industry leaders as saying, "Web development is crazy." Throughout the remainder of the book, Burdman breaks the process of Web development down to manageable chunks and offers techniques to help you successfully complete Web projects without pulling your hair out.

This isn't a book about development tools or programming languages--it's a user manual to the process of managing site development from conception to completion. The focus is on team development since almost all such projects of any scale involve a diverse collection of professionals. Brief interviews with seasoned team leaders add real-world perspective to the topic.

Burdman provides frameworks for analyzing both the project at hand and the team you have at your disposal. She tackles the process with a discussion of getting the project off the ground in an organized and complete manner. The material here is presented in plain English instead of with the usual heavy emphasis on flowcharts and management theory. She also doesn't stop with the summary of a single project cycle but covers client issues, team communication, and ongoing team cultivation as well. This book may not make all your projects go smoothly, but it will sure help. --Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered: Project scope definition, cost budgeting, team assembly, content planning, team and client communication, client education, quality assurance and testing, team evolution, and case studies.

Customer Reviews:

Good Project Management is Good Project Management.......2006-03-29

Hmm. It was interesting to read the review before this one, after reading Jessica's book. My impression of this book is that it was clearly written by someone who has been in the trenches, and managed the trenches, of both typical and demanding web-based projects over the years. Yeah, there are some references to early work and specific tools, but in general good project management is good project management. And this book outlines an approach for project management, team communication and complexity wrangling that I think is clear and pragmatic. Great book. Happy to add it to my library. I'll invariably return to it for ideas in the future.

Very outdated.......2006-02-25

I think Collaborative Web Development was ahead of its time when it was written in 1999, but today it reads more like a relic. It also doesn't help that the writing style is rudimentary (Ms. Burdman should've considered using a ghost writer) and the book is littered with typos.

Maybe the book could be useful to people who have absolutely no experience in working with companies that have a web site, but there's got to be better stuff out there.

I would NOT recommend Collaborative Web Development for anyone who has any bit of experience in project managing for the web.

This book really doesn't tell you much of anything........2003-07-22

Maybe this book had some good information in it during the early 90's when all of this stuff was new but now this book doesn't offer anything to anyone. All of the technical stuff is very old and the focus is on very simple stuff like HTML page directories and images while, the team structure chapters are conflicting seem to be written by someone who doesn't really understand the development process, and the project scenarios have little to no value.

Excellent for all Web Project Managers.......2002-03-12

I am a senior Web project manager and I am also doing my master degree in Web project management. This book is by far better than the others. The author follow a good methodology and give helpful and easy examples, she's very grounded. Recommended for junior as well as senior PM. (sorry for my poor English, I speak French!).

good introductory treatment.......2002-03-09

Three stars is generous, but I couldn't in good conscience give it fewer. The content is good-quality, but is very "shallow." Geared exclusively toward web project teams, I expected to see some new collaborative techniques, or new spins on accepted methodology. What I got (while good) was only a very basic introduction to proper project management methodology. If you are part of, or lead, a web team, and have no experience in formal methodology, grab a copy of this book. Otherwise, look elsewhere.

Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices

Average customer rating:

high level [non-technical] advice
SOA book for the business analyst

Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices
Paul Allen
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): A Planning and Implementation Guide for Business and Technology
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ASIN: 0521843367

Book Description

Companies face major challenges as they seek to flourish in competitive global markets, fuelled by developments in technology, from the Internet to grid computing and Web services. In this environment, service orientation - aligning business processes to the changing demands of customers - is emerging as a highly effective approach to increasing efficiency. In this book, Paul Allen provides an accessible guide to service orientation, showing how it works and highlighting the benefits it can deliver. The book provides an integrated approach: after covering the basics of service orientation, he discusses key issues such as business agility, designing quality-of-service infrastructure, implementing service-level agreements, and cultural factors. He provides roadmaps, definitions, templates, techniques, process patterns and checklists to help you realize service orientation. These resources are reinforced with detailed case studies, from the transport and banking sectors. Packed with valuable insights, the book will be essential reading for CIOs, IT architects and senior developers. IT facing business executives will also benefit from understanding how software services can enable their business strategies. Paul Allen is a principal business-IT strategist at CA and is widely recognized for his innovative work in component-based development (CBD), business-IT alignment and service-oriented architecture. With over thirty years experience of large-scale business systems, he is an established author whose previous book was the critically acclaimed 'Realizing e-Business with Components'. Sam Higgins is now with Forrester Research Inc.; formerly he managed the Innovation and Planning Unit of Queensland Transport's Information Services Branch. Paul McRae is the application architect in the Innovation and Planning Unit of Queensland Transport's Information Services Branch. Hermann Schlamann is a senior architect in the architecture group of Credit Suisse.

Customer Reviews:

high level [non-technical] advice.......2006-09-24

Service Oriented Architecture has gotten considerable attention recently. The book studies its potential in improving business processes. Both within a company and between companies. There is very little here at the technical level of programming. The book is pitched at a higher level, suitable for upper management interested in improving the corporate business value. Advice is furnished on how to devise measurable goals. So that any redesign does not take place in a vacuum.

It is also suggested that business agility can be enhanced. By letting a company redirect and modify existing services in an easy modular manner.

SOA book for the business analyst.......2006-03-24

Most SOA books on the market are technical books for purely technical audiences. SOA is architecture, after all, and software architecture can be a complex, technically difficult subject. Recently, though, several business-oriented books on SOA have hit the shelves. These books typically attempt to explain the intricacies of SOA and the underlying alphabet soup of technologies and standards in a non-technical fashion for an audience that would like a high-level view of what SOA is all about, but who doesn't really want to know either the technical details or how to roll up their sleeves and work with SOA themselves.

This book falls into neither of these categories. "Service-Orientation: Winning Strategies And Best Practices" is an exceptional example of a book written for a technically savvy business reader who doesn't want merely a high-level explanation of SOA, but rather wants to understand the critical SOA concepts, strategies, and best practices that they need to do their job. This choice of audience is no accident. In fact, part of the fundamental transformative nature of SOA involves new roles for the individuals at the companies that implement the architecture. Understanding the proper audience for this book, therefore, is an important step on the road to understanding SOA.

SOA is basically an approach -- or discipline, if you will -- for organizing IT resources as business-oriented Services that users can find, use, and incorporate into business processes. Core to SOA is the notion of the Services abstraction layer -- the representation of IT functionality that business users interact with. Beneath this abstraction layer are applications, servers, networks, and the rest of the heterogeneous collection of technology that IT shops maintain today. From the business user's perspective, however, this complex mishmash of technologies fade from view. What remains are the Services and the business processes that orchestrate them.

As a result, the challenges that businesses face as they leverage the power of SOA fall into two general areas: management and process. Management is the first challenge, because the business must be able to rely upon their IT infrastructure without having to pierce the Services abstraction to control the nuts and bolts of the implementation beneath. The core management issues that this book's audience must focus on include Service execution management, Service level management, as well as the management of the business process that constitute the second set of challenges for businesses that implement SOA. Among those challenges are building business Services and composing them into business processes that are themselves Services. Such Service-oriented processes enable the broad redesign of the older, inflexible processes that are typically in place today at most organizations.

The level of detail this book provides, therefore, is for a new kind of audience that must understand the intricacies of Service-oriented management and process. The average business reader will not typically need or want this level of detail, and the typical technical reader will require more information about the technical details underneath the Services abstraction than this book intends to provide. The big question, therefore, is what sort of person is among the audience for this book, and are you that sort of person?

The most common title for this book's target audience member might be business analyst, and there's no question that many business analysts will find this book useful and understandable. However, the business analyst title is poorly defined, and two people with this title at different organizations might find their jobs to be vastly different. As companies implement SOA, though, it is likely that many business analysts will find their roles coalescing onto a more specific set of responsibilities centering on process and management as explained above.

Other roles that may either fall into the broader business analyst category or be separate titles in their own right are that of the Service architect and business process architect. As explained in Chapter 13, people in these roles focus on building business Services, composing them into processes, and then managing those processes as they meet changing business requirements. Such people are business-oriented yet technically savvy, understand SOA from a business perspective, and often act as liaisons between business management and IT. Regardless of whether your title is business analyst, Service architect, or process architect, if you are a roll-up-the-sleeves business reader and you find yourself in this bridge role between business and IT as your company implements SOA, then this book is for you.

Making Common Sense Common Practice: Models for Manufacturing Excellence

Average customer rating:

Great career development material

Making Common Sense Common Practice: Models for Manufacturing Excellence
Ron Moore
Manufacturer: Butterworth-Heinemann
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Selecting the Right Manufacturing Improvement Tools: What Tool? When?
Reliability-Centered Maintenance Second Edition
Successfully Managing Change in Organizations: A User's Guide
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook (McGraw-Hill Handbooks)
Overall Equipment Effectiveness

ASIN: 0750674628

Book Description

Make more money in the manufacturing business - but not through cost-cutting and employee layoffs. This book clearly describes how you can turn common sense into common practice to achieve superior manufacturing performance and low-cost production.

Presenting the best practices of the best manufacturing companies in the world, this book presents proven models for achieving world-class performance. Using a fictional company called Beta International, the book illustrates the success and failures of the world's premier manufacturers, illustrating a stable path of growth for almost any manufacturing company.

Through the experience of Beta International, you'll see how to increase uptime, lower costs, increase market share, maximize asset utilization, apply benchmarks and best practices, and improve many other aspects that ultimately raise your company's performance to the level of world-class. 'Making Common Sense Common Practice' takes a good, hard look at plant design, procurement, parts management, installation and maintenance, training and even offers a chapter on how to implement a computerized maintenance management system.

In today's tough competitive markets, 'Making Common Sense Common Practice' greatly enhances your company's chance to succeed - and profit.

presents the best practices and proven models from the best manufacturing companies from around the world by exploring the successes and failures that have led to a stable path of growth for any company

Author is a manufacturing management consultant to major manufacturers from all over North and South America to the U.K., Europe, Asia, Russia, and Australia, with over 30 years experience studying and solving management performance.

Customer Reviews:

Great career development material.......2007-01-11

Ron Moore's knowledge and passion for business comes out in his book "Making Common Sense, Common Practice". I give this book to supervisors as required reading material when they are preparing for the Society of Maintenance & Reliability Society's - Certified Maintenance & Reliability Professional Exam.

Advancing Women's Careers: Research and Practice

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Advancing Women's Careers: Research and Practice

Manufacturer: Blackwell Publishing Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Advancing Women in Business--The Catalyst Guide: Best Practices from the Corporate Leaders (Jossey Bass Business and Management Series)
Leadership: Theory and Practice

ASIN: 0631223908

Book Description

The perspectives brought together here provide a practical look at the impact and role of women in organizations. The volume explores the various initiatives that leading-edge organizations have implemented to support the career advancement of managerial and professional women, and analyses which measures worked, and which did not. The current directions in business that underpin changes in policies adopted for women managers are highlighted and linked to this discussion.The contributions to the book come from leading scholars and researchers as well as human resource professionals responsible for implementing specific organizational efforts.

Maximizing Business Performance through Software Packages: Best Practices for Justification, Selection, and Implementat

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Maximizing Business Performance through Software Packages: Best Practices for Justification, Selection, and Implementat
Robert W. Starinsky
Manufacturer: CRC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Software Selection Questionnaire
A Guide to Software Package Evaluation & Selection: The R2ISC Method
Request for Proposal: A Guide to Effective RFP Development
Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business

ASIN: 1574443291

Book Description

Learn how to: § Select the best ERP software for your organization § Choose the most effective wrap around software to enhance the performance of an existing ERP system § Align software selection with business goals and objectives § Budget for the software and the hidden costs involved in its implementation At times a daring, maddening, and even frightening process, finding and implementing a suitable software package is never an easy task. The cost of the software package is often a fraction of the overall expense. Unless carefully selected, a major software package implementation can consume a considerable amount of your organization's time and energy. An ill-informed purchase can cost your organization it's customers, dollars, and reputation. Maximizing Business Performance through Software Packages: Best Practices for Justification, Selection, and Implementation explores the business challenges involved in justifying, selecting, and implementing software packages. It contains practical advice and insights on how to select "good fitting" software packages, how to justify them in terms of their ability to enable business process change or improvement, and most importantly, how to implement them successfully. Selecting and implementing enterprise architecture technology software solutions involves a large expenditure across all the resources of an organization. The process has become increasingly complex as business functions have become increasingly integrated. Maximizing Business Performance through Software Packages: Best Practices for Justification, Selection, and Implementation provides a definitive source that will help you select the solutions that best fit your business needs.

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