Project Management: A Managerial Approach, 8th Edition

Preface

APPROACH

The use of projects and project management continues to grow in our society and its organizations. We are able to achieve goals through project organization that could be achieved only with the greatest of difficulty if organized in traditional ways. Though project management has existed since before the days of the great pyramids, its use has virtually exploded since the mid-1990s. Businesses regularly use project management to accomplish unique outcomes with limited resources under critical time constraints. In the service sector of the economy, the use of project management to achieve an organization's goals is even more common. Advertising campaigns, voter registration drives, political campaigns, a family's annual summer vacation, and even management seminars on the subject of project management are organized as projects. A relatively new growth area in the use of project management is the use of projects as a way of accomplishing organizational change. Indeed, there is a rapid increase in the number of firms that use projects as the preferred way of accomplishing almost everything they undertake.

As the field has grown, so has its literature. There are now professional books and booklets covering every imaginable aspect of project management: earned value calculations, team building, cost estimating, purchasing, project management software, scheduling, leadership, ...