Twenty One Ways to Excel at Project Management
By Duncan Haughey
Project Smart
Format Microsoft Reader 
Price: £4.00
See larger cover photo
This eBook gives twenty-one pieces of valuable advice guaranteed to help any project run more smoothly. The book is especially useful to new and aspiring project managers as well as being a useful reminder to the more experienced.
Book Extract
Project management in the modern sense began in the early 1960s, although it has its roots much further back in the latter years of the 19th century. The need for project management was driven by businesses that realised the benefits of organising work around projects and the critical need to communicate and co-ordinate work across departments and professions. One of the grandfathers of project management is still a familiar name today, Henry Gantt (1861-1919) creator of the Gantt chart. Still in use today, almost one hundred-years from their inception, Gantt Charts are one of the project managers' most valuable tools. In the mid-20th century PERT charts emerged, complex network diagrams that show the critical path of a project. These tools and techniques spread quickly as businesses looked for new ways to manage large and complex activities, evolving into project management, as we know it today.
It is now forty years since the birth of project management and much of the early work has been collected and put together into formal methodologies. Although many different methodologies exist, they generally all work with the same basic principles and good practice developed over the past forty years. So now you may expect that we are expert when it comes to running projects, but forty years on and project failures are still with us and according to some observers rising in number.