Project Management: A Managerial Approach

by Jack R. Meredith

The book is primarily intended for use as a college textbook for teaching project management at the advanced undergraduate or master's level. The text is appropriate for classes on the management of service, product, engineering projects, as well as information systems (IS). Thus, we have included some coverage of material concerning information systems and how IS projects differ from and are similar to regular business projects. The authors draw upon their personal experiences working with project managers and on the experience of friends and colleagues who have spent much of their working lives serving as project managers in the "real world." Thus, in contrast to the books that are about project management, this book teaches students how to do project management.
Project A Managerial Approach 5E addresses project management from a management perspective rather than a cookbook, special area treatise, or collection of loosely associated articles. It addresses the basic nature of managing all types of projects - public, business, engineering, information systems, and so on - as well as specific techniques and insights required to carry out this unique way of getting things done. It deals with the problems of selecting projects, initiating them, and operating and controlling them. It discusses the demands made on the project manager and the nature of the manager's interaction with the rest of the parent organization. It covers the difficult problems associated with conducting a project using people and organizations that represent different cultures and may be separated by considerable distances. It even covers the issues arising when the decision is made to terminate a project.

Genres: Business, Textbooks, Management, Nonfiction, Education, Reference, School

Hardcover

First published December 30, 1994

Reviews

[Caitlin]

This book was definitely informative and taught me a lot about Project Management, but visually, it was hard to get through. This sounds like something trivial, but the human mind needs to be stimulated to stay focused on a subject, and the book's bland layout and color scheme did NOT help matters! Nice balance of focus on theoretical PM and then software procedures/strategies though.

[Mazen Astwani]

A good support to the PMBOK as it explains the methods with examples on implementation

[Emilia Greendevald]

What stands out in the book is how clearly it connects project management with real organizational behavior and quantitative decision-making. In practice, the hardest part is often not managing a single project but keeping several initiatives aligned without losing focus or efficiency. I also came across a useful breakdown of tools and approaches for handling multi projects, I also advise you to read more in detail if this is also relevant for you. The book's framework still feels very practical for anyone dealing with structured yet complex environments.

[Michelle Sauvageau]

Read this textbook for a Project Management course this semester. It was dense with information.. but the layout an formatting was terrible. Just plain text everywhere with minimal examples, charts, etc. to break up the text and make it more digestible. Made it tough to focus for reading assignments.

[Sehr]

......

[Madison]

Read this book as part of a project management course. It was fairly supplemental to the course but would have been an easier read without an abundance of excess material.

[Bibhu Ashish]

Nice book which gives a high level view of the project management as a profession for a person experienced in general management. The best part of the book is questions and case studies given at the end. Can be used as a study book for project management courses and also by students who are interested to know more about project management.
If you already into hard core project management you can give this book a miss. But yes, you can just glance through this to refresh your project management concepts.

[Anna]

Gotta do homework too. Reading this book for my online college class. Maybe it'll get me a raise!

[Mark]

This was a very dull book, but I enjoyed the subject.