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

Foreword

You have in your hands a book that is both a critical tool for, and a symbol of, our innovation economy.

Our twenty-first-century workplace is the scene of rapid, visible evolution. This rapid evolution means we are surrounded by projects. Some projects are huge, such as a new commercial airplane model. But the proliferation of projects is due more to an increase in small projects, such as implementing standardized processes in an operating room, a promotion campaign for a winery, or opening a new office for a growing business. There are many reasons the pace of change and the number of projects are increasing, but there is no doubt it is true, for the evidence is all around us.

Projects generate chaos. How could they not? The definition of a project is work that has a beginning and an end, and produces a unique product or service. By their nature, every project has an element of discovery, doing something that hasn't been done exactly that way before. Every project is different from the last one. It's the opposite of the twentieth-century focus on continuous process improvement—refining the way we manufacture a car or process a bank loan until we drive out all inefficiency and error. Managing a single project may not quite constitute chaos, but as projects proliferate we find ourselves juggling a collection of increasingly diverse tasks, goals, and resources.

The project-driven workplace emerged in the 1990s. In that one decade, the discipline of project management broke ...