Preface to the Third Edition

Like many things in life, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Interest in project management remains fairly high, though there has been some decline in recent years. However, the practice of project management remains questionable, as project failures continue to be almost as numerous as they were when the first and second editions of this book were published.

It is one thing to talk about project management and an entirely different thing to do it. It seems to me there are a lot of talkers out there but not many do-ers.

This year, 2006, marks my 25th anniversary as a project manager instructor and consultant. I have personally trained over 30,000 individuals in project management. Yet my guess is that less than ten percent of them actually practice what they learned. There are many reasons, but the foremost is probably that the organization does not support them in practicing formal project management. In the United States, and perhaps in many other countries, there is a preference for action rather than planning. We just want to get the job done, and planning is often viewed as a waste of time.

This is not true, but it is the perception. In fact, one hour spent in planning will generally save about three hours in execution time. As I have heard it expressed, you have to go slow to go fast.

One example of the validity of this statement is that in 1983 the San Diego Builder’s Association conducted a competition to see how fast they could build a single-family house. This was a house built on a cement slab, approximately 2000 square feet in size, and when finished, had sod grass in the yard, was fully wired, carpeted, and was ready to be occupied. The house was not prefabricated, nor was the cement slab poured when the starting gun was fired. Two houses were built simultaneously by two different work crews. The winning team finished their house in an incredible two hours and forty-five minutes!

You may ask how this can be, as the slab takes several days to completely cure. They mixed exothermic chemicals in the cement to make it gel faster—it was cured in 45 minutes.

The previous week, two identical houses were built, and the time required was six hours. What they learned from these two houses was incorporated into changes to the plan, so that the next week, they cut the time by more than 50 percent—showing the value of lessons-learned reviews.

The point of all this is simple—you don’t build a house in two-hours-and-forty-five minutes unless you have a really good plan, so the message is that, if time is really important to you, then you should take time to plan your projects.

While this book is intended to give a quick overview of project management—the tools, techniques, and discipline as a whole—it does contain what you need to manage your projects. But as obvious as it may seem, reading the book won’t speed up your work. You have to apply the tools and techniques, and if you do, you can be sure your projects will go a lot better. Good luck.

Jim Lewis

Vinton, VA

May 2006