12 June 2009

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Featured Items of the Month at the Marketplace

Executing Your Strategy: How to Break It Down and Get It Done

By Mark Morgan, Raymond E. Levitt, William A. Malek

Why do businesses consistently fail to execute their competitive strategies? Because leaders don't identify and invest in the full range of projects and programs required to align the organization with its strategy.

Even when strategy makers do break their plans down into doable chunks, they seldom work with project leaders to prioritize strategic investments and needed resources. They often neglect to revise the strategic portfolio to fit the demands of a dynamic environment, or to stay connected to strategic projects through completion, as new products, services, skills and capabilities are transferred into operations.

In Executing Your Strategy, Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt and William Malek present six guidelines that enable you to do the right strategic projects—and do those projects right. Together, the guidelines combine to create the acronym INVEST:

• Ideation: clarify and communicate purpose, identity and long-range intention
• Nature: develop alignment between strategy, structure and culture based on ideation
• Vision: create clear goals and metrics aligned to strategy and guided by ideation
• Engagement: do the right projects based on the strategy through portfolio management
• Synthesis: do projects and programs right, in alignment with your organization’s portfolio
• Transition: move the project and program outputs into operations where benefit is realized

Full of examples and advice, this new resource shows you how to make strategy happen in your organization.

PMI member price: US$28.45. Purchase this title online at PMI.org/Marketplace.

Project Management Recipes for Success

By Guy L. De Furia

This book explains the procedures for running a successful project and highlights the finer points of managing and controlling the project. It is written specifically for those responsible for the hands-on managing of projects, but is also useful to program managers and senior executives.

Project managers gain the confidence that comes from following a good recipe for success. Program managers gain a perspective on the myriad of activities their project managers must perform to achieve a well-disciplined project. Senior managers gain a perspective of the approach necessary at the beginning of a project to reduce the number of ill-advised projects and the effort required to achieve successful projects.

• Uses examples to explain every document and procedure
• Includes a CD-ROM of all examples, tables, charts and automated procedures
• Discusses the political side of managing a project
• Covers the necessary activities and their purposes, the role of a project manager, outputs, potential problems, definitions, examples and automated procedures
• Contains a glossary of terms defined in English

PMI member price: US$47.45. Purchase this title online at PMI.org/Marketplace.