Managing Projects as Investments

Every project is an investment; however, traditional project management methodologies do not support assessment of the business value that enables senior management to maximize decision making. The next evolution in project management, therefore, will be to manage projects as investments. Managing Projects as Investments: Earned Value to Business Value provides tools and metrics to enable planning, measuring, evaluating, and optimizing projects.

This book shifts the paradigm. It builds on traditional scope-cost-schedule tools, adding a critical new focus on the expected value of projects and programs. The enhancements in processes and metrics allow senior management and PMOs to guide the entire organization on the basis of business benefits, and to ensure that decisions ranging from project selection to resource assignment facilitate those goals. The author shows how framing projects as investments enables significant improvement in project performance. He provides metrics that allow you and your team to track and maximize performance based on ROI.

Demonstrating the importance of recognizing an enabler project in a program, and why its value and cost of time are so great, the book provides the tools to determine right-sized staffing levels for project-driven organizations. It includes a comprehensive but easy-to-understand explanation of both basic and advanced earned value metrics, their shortcomings, and how they can be improved and shows you how to optimize contract terms on projects in a way that can avoid misaligned customer/contractor goals.

Stephen A. Devaux, PMP, MSPM, is president of Analytic Project Management (APM), a training and consulting company he founded in 1992. APM is a Global R.E.P. of the Project Management Institute (PMI). Their clients include BAE Systems, Siemens, Wells Fargo, Texas Instruments, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, iRobot, L-3 Communications, American Power Conversion, Irving Oil, and Respironics.
Devaux is the author of the book, Total Project Control: A Manager’s Guide to Integrated Project Planning, Measuring, and Tracking (1999, Wiley). He has worked to develop and use new approaches and metrics in project management with clients in a wide range of industries. “When the DIPP Dips” was published in the Project Management Journal in 1992 (an article that was reprinted in PMI’s Essentials of Project Control in 1999). He has contributed chapters on his new scheduling metric, critical path drag, in two 2013 books: Project Management in the Oil and Gas Industries and Handbook of Emergency Response. He has authored numerous articles and PMI webinars, and is a frequent speaker at PMI chapter meetings throughout the United States.
He began his career at Fidelity Investments, Citicorp, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and then taught and consulted in project management at Project Software and Development, Inc. (PSDI). He has taught graduate project management courses at Suffolk University, Brandeis University, and The University of the West Indies/Barbados and in executive education programs at Bentley University and University of Massachusetts/Lowell. Born in Barbados, he has been living in the United States since 1964. He is a Vietnam veteran and a naturalized US citizen. He lives with his wife, Deborah, in Swampscott, Massachusetts.