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Acknowledgments

This book is built on the experience and knowledge of many people I have worked with over the years. If I named them all, the list would be as long as the credits at the end of an epic film! Here are a few mentions for those who have gone the extra mile with me.

I would like to thank my former colleagues at Gibb Ltd who took me on as a graduate and turned me into an engineer. Thanks, too, to those at PA Consulting Group who took on an engineer and gave me my grounding in business-led project management. Also I thank their clients with whom I worked and who presented me with such valuable challenges. Nick Warrillow, of Lloyds TSB Bank, is just one I want to mention.

Unlike many books, this one was written by one of the ‘infantry’: I am not an academic. I would like to thank Jim Reynolds, formerly the Products and Services Director at Cable and Wireless, for giving me the opportunity to write the book and to share my experiences with you. My thanks also to Grant Holdom at BT, for creating an environment in which the methods described in this book could thrive, and to Alan Fowler, of Isochron, for his stunning insights into benefits management, to Dr Eddie Obeng for introducing me to his frameworks and concepts relating to project types, to Oded Cohen of the Goldratt Institute who opened my eyes to the Theory of Constraints, to Chris Worseley at CITI for his work on project manager profiling, to Alan Crean of Process Master for his ground breaking process design tool and to John Anderson for his insights into portfolio management.

Thank you also to the companies who took part in the benchmarking.

Putting a business-led project framework in place is a challenging and difficult task. Having the ideas is not enough – it is what you do with them that counts. During 1995, I worked with Anatoli Kaminov from Bain & Company. He looked at what I was doing and added his own spark of intelligence and practicality. He also said to me, ‘Robert, you’ve done the ground-work; why don’t you write the book?’ So, thanks Anatoli, for giving me a push to produce the first edition…and now here is the fourth edition.

Most important of all, I would like to thank my wife, Sandra, for hours of proof-reading and the solid support she has given me to ensure this venture succeeds.

And after all this, am I satisfied with what has been achieved? No – there’s always more to do!

Robert Buttrick, June 2009
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