8.1 Introduction

This book endeavours to describe what could be called ‘best practice’ in project management. Unfortunately, not all organizations follow these good practices, which is one of the reasons why there are so many project failures. In this chapter, we describe the elements of the project management structure that should exist in an organization that is planning and executing a project. In many cases, these roles will be known by different names to the ones we use. Many of the terms we use are loosely based on those used by PRINCE 2, the project management standard sponsored by the UK government. Note that we will use capitalized initial letters, for example Senior User, where this refers to a very specific PRINCE 2 concept.

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