Includes bibliographical reference and index.

PREFACE

Preface
The roots of this effort go back many years in our collective attempts to install standard project
development methodologies into large organizations. Also, through all those years we have been
involved with projects of one kind or another. Around 2003, the roots of this effort began when
one of the authors joined the University of Houston to teach project management thinking that
it would be an easy subject given previous experience. However, it soon became obvious that this
subject was not well documented in a student readable or model-type format. As a result, students
struggled to get an understandable broad real flavor of the topic. Most of the textbooks on the
market were either too sterilely academic, too narrow of an industry view, or too much real world
“silver bullet” quick fix advice types. Based on that assessment, the vision of correcting that shortcoming
began to take shape. After four years of thrashing around with the topic, the first edition
of this text resulted. Over the next 10 years, two more iterations of this effort were produced, this
being the third edition. The project model term for this type of evolution is “progressive elaboration.”
In plain language, that really means it can be done better and that is what this latest version
has as its goal.
One major content target is to stay faithful to the Project Management Institute (PMI) Project
Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK•) Guide, which is considered to be the de facto standard
for project management description. Beyond that, the goal is to make the verbiage readable
and understandable. You as the reader will have to decide how well this effort matched these goals.
The academic program at the University of Houston is heavily based on the Project
Management Institute’s (PMI) model and curriculum guidelines. That bias formed the foundation
for the text, but not the complete final table of contents. As packaged here, the core chapters
not only stay reasonably close to the PMI model, but also attempt to show how this model fits a
real-world project. In this regard, the material in the text is viewed as a companion to the technical
model guide and should be of help to someone studying for various project management
certifications.
There are several project-related sub-model frameworks sponsored by PMI today and many of
these are covered in dedicated chapters of the text. Specifically, the following six major sub-model
topics are discussed in some detail:
◾◾ Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)
◾◾ Earned Value Management (EVM)
◾◾ Enterprise project management (PMO)
◾◾ Portfolio management (PPM)
◾◾ Professional responsibility and ethics
◾◾ Agile life cycle