Building Customer-Based Project Organizations »

JEFFREY K. PINTO, PhD, is a professor of management at Penn State Erie, where he holds the Samuel A. and Elizabeth B. Breene Fellowship in Management. He has won international acclaim for his research in project management, which Fortune labeled the number one profession in corporate America for the coming decade. Pinto's ten previous books include The PMI Handbook of Project Management and Successful Project Managers (both from Wiley).

PEKKA J. ROUHIAINEN, PhD, is a professional project manager with Aker Rauma Offshore, Oy. Dr. Rouhiainen received his PhD from Tampere University of Technology in Finland. He has over twenty years of project management experience and has worked on or managed numerous multimillion-dollar projects. Currently located in Houston, Rouhiainen has extensive exposure in international project management.

"If you don't take care of your customers, someone else will."-Tom Peters, In Search of Excellence

No one doubts the truth of Tom Peters's simple business axiom. While many project-based organizations pay lip service to customer satisfaction, however, their policies and reward systems focus on internal measures of success rather than customer relationships. How can project-based organizations be sure that they are setting the right goal-and rewarding behavior that will help achieve it?

In Building Customer-Based Project Orga-nizations, project management gurus Jeffrey Pinto and Pekka Rouhiainen provide proven methods and techniques that help project organizations "get it right." The organization's primary goal, they say, is establishing and maintaining long-term relationships with customers. The authors demonstrate that the key to these relationships is a healthy climate between suppliers and customers-the supply chain.

Pinto has spent years helping project-based firms succeed through careful management of their customers and suppliers. Drawing on this experience, he formulates principles that apply across business types, work equally well both within and between organizations, and are proven to keep customers coming back for more.

Using examples of success from such stellar performers as General Electric, Ericsson, and Nokia, this book shows project-based firms how to use three business functions-customer service, project management, and supply chain management-to deliver greater value to the customer and the organization. The authors demonstrate how this approach leads to greater profitability by reducing time to market, trimming inventory and supplier costs, and minimizing product obsolescence. They also provide an implementation strategy for establishing customer focus and streamlining product development and supply chain operations.

Building Customer-Based Project Organi-zations presents the key to success to managers responsible for an organization's supply chain, logistics, product development, and operations strategies. It also gives MBA students in business and engineering a vivid picture of how to implement and sustain successful project management in the real world.