Project Management in Practice, Fourth Edition

Preface

THE APPROACH

Over the past several decades, more and more work has been accomplished through the use of projects and project management. The use of projects has been growing at an accelerated rate. The exponential growth of membership in the Project Management Institute (PMI) is convincing evidence, as are the sales of computer software devoted to project management. Several societal forces are driving this growth, and many economic factors are reinforcing it. We describe these in Chapter 1 of this book.

A secondary effect has also been a major contributor to the use of project activity. As the use of projects has grown, its very success as a way of getting complex activities carried out successfully has become well established. The result has been a striking increase in the use of projects to accomplish jobs that in the past would simply have been turned over to someone with the comment, "Take care of it."

What happened then was that some individual undertook to carry out the job with little or no planning, little or no assistance, few resources, and often with only a vague notion of what was really wanted. The simple application of routine project management techniques significantly improved the consistency with which the outcomes resembled what the organization had in mind when the chore was assigned. Later, this sort of activity came to be known as "enterprise project management," "management by projects," and several other names, all of which are described as the project-oriented ...