Congratulations. You have been given your own project to run. If you are like most project managers, part of you is elated that your company has entrusted you with an important assignment, while the rest of you is petrified that it will soon discover the magnitude of its error. Whether the project is your first and you are being ''tried out," or you have been doing this for years but never on a project this big, this book is designed for you. I hope you find it valuable.

Project management is management. Its context and constraints are different from those of line management, but its concern is the same: to direct a group of people to achieve an objective. Therefore, project managers need to know how to manage budgets, people, and processes.

Why, then, do so many companies assign senior technical peoplewho usually have little interest in or aptitude for managementto head up projects? More critically, why are there so few trained project managers in an industry that is project-driven? One reason is that companies tend to regard project management as secondary: not as important as line management or technical skills, and certainly not a career goal for ambitious souls.

The result is that projects founder, destroying schedules, shredding estimates, derailing careers, and delivering results that are accepted out of desperation rather than design. In the longer term, those who have managed these commonplace disasters retreat from project management and either return to the technical world or move into "real" management. So project managers are not developed, and the cycle continues.

It is to those corporate managers, project managers, and technical staff who understand that project management is a special discipline that this book is directed.