Detailed Review

Published 2009
Pages: 157 

Divided into ten chapters, written by as many different experts in project management, this book comprehensively covers a wide range of topics that relate to the defense industry. The overarching theme is that the projects in the defense industry have an unmatched level of complexity, in their management and in their output, and this leads to unusual challenges for procurement, governance, and management. 

By allowing each contributor about a dozen pages on average, this ensures that information is condensed and well-prepared. The individual chapters can even be used as a quick reference. 

As with many similar books I wished for more clarity and coherence in the basic definitions and terminology. The aspect of "systems" and net-centricity can be applied in at least three ways: to the products, to the industry and societal context, and to the organization of the projects that build the products in the contextual ecosystem. 

The chapters are:

• Introduction: Framing the COmplexity Challenge (Guy Ben-Ari and Matthew Zlatnik)
• Making Governance matter More: Oversight, Insight, and Foresight in Complex Systems Procurement (Michael Schrage)
• Models for Governing Large Systems Projects (Harvey M. Sapolsky)
• Competition and Innovation under Complexity (Jeffrey A. Drezner)
• Systems Integration for Complex Defense Projects (Eugene Gholz)
• A New Way of Thinking about Enterprise Capability Development: Network-Centric, Enterprise-Wide System-of-Systems Engineering (Jeremy M. Kaplan)
• Engineering of Complex Systems: Challenge in the Theory and Practice (Douglas O. Norman)
• Managing Megaprojects: Lessons for Future COmbat Systems (Marco Iansiti)
• Managing Government Effectively in a Complex Environment: Influencing Networks through the Network Campaign (W. Scott Gould and Julie M. Anderson)
• Human Capital for Complexity (David H. Dombkins)