Jay Thatcher
Project management skills decide whether your next launch, rollout, or move finishes on schedule or runs months late. This book teaches the full method in plain language, with real cases and no prior background required. Of more than 16,000 projects tracked in an Oxford University database, only 8.5 percent finished on time and on budget. The methods here show you how to land in that group. The chapters follow a project in the order you live through one, from the first question of whether the work counts as a project to the review that checks months later whether the benefits arrived. Each new term gets a short definition and a worked example, and each method comes with an honest account of where it breaks down. The ten chapters walk through: - The triple constraint, the five process groups, and how PMBOK and PRINCE2 fit together - Functional, matrix, and projectized structures, plus what a PMO and a steering committee actually decide - Waterfall, Scrum, Kanban, and hybrid delivery, with a practical way to match the method to the work - Business cases, charters, and stakeholder analysis - Requirements, scope statements, work breakdown structures, three-point estimates, the critical path, float, and Gantt charts - Cost baselines, contingency and management reserves, resource leveling, and the contract types that decide who pays for an overrun - Risk registers, probability-impact matrices, expected monetary value, Monte Carlo simulation, and how to tell a risk from an issue or an assumption - RACI charts, the stages of team development, situational leadership, and how to lead people who do not report to you, including remote staff - Earned value with CPI and SPI, quality control, change control that stops scope creep, and the dashboards that keep status honest - Formal handover, lessons learned, and benefits realization The examples come from real work. You will see why the Sydney Opera House opened ten years late at more than fourteen times its budget, how the Empire State Building went up in about 13 months, and what goes wrong when a 40-person accounting firm replaces its client records system. Every chapter closes with scenario questions, and example responses at the back let you test your thinking before you check it. This book is written for: - New and aspiring project managers - Professionals handed a project with no formal training - Small business owners running a launch, an office move, or a software switch - Students in business, engineering, and IT courses - Anyone preparing to study for the PMP or CAPM A glossary of terms, a full list of works cited, and recommended readings round out the reference material. Read it front to back to build a working foundation, or open the chapter you need when a schedule slips, a sponsor keeps adding features, or two senior staff stop speaking. You finish with methods, frameworks, and techniques you can apply to the project on your desk this week.
