Project Management Theory and Practice

Abstract

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 short- coming 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 elabora- tion.” In plain language, that really means it can be done better and that is what this latest version

has as its goal.