Making It Happen: A Non-Technical Guide to Project Management

Preface

This book has two things to offer you as a reader.

The first is a unique and superior approach to the discipline of project management. Much is known about projects (and vastly more is written), but not much is widely understood. The ideas presented here were refined over many years by individuals who have spent their careers in the field, making the concepts of the management sciences work. This useful approach was not developed without cost and frustration, and there is a great deal contained here that you will find nowhere else.

The second is the manner in which the ideas are conveyed. Learning should always be an adventure, although sometimes it is not. If you've ever stumbled through a dry textbook, struggling to make important information stick in your brain, you'll appreciate the alternative approach taken by this book. Without the excitement generated by discovery, it is very hard to retain, let alone implement, new ideas.

Making learning interesting has been one of the greatest challenges of my job. My colleagues and I have developed a number of techniques for doing this, and in the course of our work, experienced a great deal of success in improving how companies operate. In early 1993, I decided to take the approach that became the following story. This is not another attempt to make a simple subject complex, nor to make a complex subject seem simple. It is a demonstration of how simple it really is.

If you choose this book to assist you in your learning adventure, ...