The New One-Page Project Manager: Communicate and Manage Any Project With A Single Sheet of Paper, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Seventeen years ago, a skeleton of the One-Page Project Manager (OPPM) was crafted in the Cincinnati airport by a small project team while we waited for a delayed flight. Our company president had asked us to find a way to collect the necessary project components, wrap them around a standard X-chart, and report to him on a single page.

That sounded nearly impossible. Project reports for upper management typically ran to many, often dozens, of pages, so we were certainly in favor of exploring ways to eliminate any non-value-added work. We therefore crafted the first OPPM to document the plan and communicate the progress for a project to design and build a $10 million warehouse with automated storage and distribution. Then, for the next decade, we used the OPPM to communicate the status of projects of all sizes and also to actually manage small projects.

It has now been seven years since work was started on my book The One-Page Project Manager, where the OPPM templates and methods were shared with project managers and other interested practitioners. Since that initial publication, I have taught project management at the University of Utah and Westminster College in Salt Lake City and have consulted with Fortune 500 companies and taught seminars in the United States and abroad. Two additional books followed, The One-Page Project Manager for IT Projects and The One-Page Project Manager for Execution, written with O.C. Tanner and Westminster colleague Mike Collins.

Another ...