Personal Effectiveness in Project Management

Personal Effectiveness in Project Management Project Management Institute, 2013, ISBN: 9781628250299, paperback, 207 pages, $27.95 Member, $34.95 Nonmember

Soft skills are hard.

Most project managers are comfortable with the "hard" skills their profession requires, such as planning, budgeting, procurement, quality control and risk management. They are typically less familiar with the human behaviors behind the hard skills, the "soft" factors that are actually the key drivers of project success-and failure.

In Personal Effectiveness in Project Management, project manager and professor Zachary Wong, PhD, provides readers with tools and techniques to help them improve not only their personal performance, but that of their project teams as well.

Dr. Wong's decades of personal effectiveness experience taught him that learning soft skills requires the same rigor as hard skills. In fact, one of the book's most valuable achievements is putting soft skills into a hard framework that readers can use for themselves and their team members.

Dr. Wong's approach divides personal effectiveness into four major functions: decision-making, motivation, achievement and self-sustainability. The author, who is an educator at the University of California, makes these complex topics approachable to managers and workers of all levels.

While he may draw upon classroom experience to present his concepts, the tools and techniques that underlie Dr. Wong's system are all based on real examples, real research and real tools drawn from his decades of professional experience working as a project manager, mentor and consultant.

The book's unique approach takes the reader through the modules, seeking to clarify and optimize performance in each area. Dr. Wong makes it clear, however, that these modules are not ends unto themselves, but rather they exist to help the reader gain the communication and interpersonal skills necessary to lead and manage teams.

"The true measure of project success," he says in the introduction, "is not doing a project well but doing many projects well over a long time and feeling personally satisfied."

The book's unique approach takes the reader through the modules, seeking to clarify and optimize performance in each area.

Zachary Wong, PhD