Innovations in production and project management over the last 100 years were driven first by the manufacturing companies and, later, by the aerospace and defence industries. The construction industry has a long record of project management practice and is well recognized for using or adapting appropriate project management methods and software to good effect.

Project management spans many management disciplines and relies on a wide range of diverse technical and managerial skills. The average construction project manager must be able to communicate and work with the client, the company accountant, the bank, the purchasing manager, the architect, the design engineer, specialists and contractors in specialist trades, site supervisors, the human resources manager, lawyers, insurers, various professional bodies, and with local authority officers and other statutory bodies. The construction industry, like many others, is awash with regulations, some of which carry severe penalties if they are flouted. So project management can be a very broad subject, impossible to cover fully in a single introductory textbook.

However, if we pare away all the ancillary topics, a small group of essential core project management skills remains. These are the methods by which a project is organized, planned and controlled. These are the essential processes needed to ensure that the project meets the three primary objectives of cost, time and performance or, in other words, that the project is finished to the mutual satisfaction of the client and the contractor. But confining the discussion to these core elements still leaves a wide range of possible topics because the project management methods chosen will depend to a large extent on the size and nature of the project. Even the objectives themselves are not always clear-cut, and there will always be other ‘stakeholders’, apart from the client and the contractor, whose wishes must be taken into account.

A few large projects need very sophisticated techniques but most projects are relatively small and can be managed with a mix of common sense and fairly straightforward methods. Every successful modern construction company of significant size has at least one project support office or planning group. Thus the large construction groups are not short of experts when it comes to dealing with very large projects. So this book is intended as an introduction for those who are new to the subject, starting with projects at the smaller end of the scale.

The author starts by describing topics that are best suited to very small projects. Later chapters are organized to some extent so that they gradually become more relevant to larger and more complex projects. So the reader who has a small family business will probably need to read only the first few chapters. But, as that family business expands and the projects (and, we hope, the profits) become larger, he or she can revisit this book and delve into the later chapters. There is a short list of titles at the end for those who would like to read further into the subject of this rewarding profession.

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