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Most project managers are comfortable with the ”hard” skills that their profession requires: planning, budgeting, procurement, quality, risk, execution, human resources, monitoring and control. They are typically less accomplished at the human behaviors behind the hard skills... the ”soft” human factors that are actually the key drivers of project success...and failure.
In Personal Effectiveness in Project Management, project manager and professor Zachary A. Wong, PhD provides readers with the tools and techniques that not only help them improve their own personal performance, but that of their project teams as well.
Personal Effectiveness begins within.
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 at readers can use for themselves and their team members.
The book is divided into four modules, each addressing a different aspect of Personal Effectiveness: Decision-Making, Motivation, Achievement and Sustainability. The book’s unique approach takes the reader through the modules, seeking to clarify and optimize the reader’s performance in each area. Dr. Wong’s book makes it clear however that these modules are not ends unto themselves, but rather exist to help each 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 to do many projects well over a long time and feeling personally satisfied”.