Project Management in the Real World won’t teach you how to be a project manager. It’s not going to show you how to set up your first project, walk you through it and see you out the other end with all the benefits realized. Traditional project management books do that, following the project lifecycle with chapters on project definition, initiation, execution, closure and so on. This book is different. It’s for people who already know that a project has a beginning, a middle and an end and who want to take project management further. It’s for people who know the theory and feel there must be an easier way to get things done.It’s over 250 years’ worth of combined project management experience distilled into 200 pages so you can see how other people run their projects outside the management texts and research papers: how projects get done in the real world. This book is organized into five sections: managing the project budgets, scope, teams, plans and yourself as project manager. Wherever you are in your project, you should be able to easily find information relevant to the particular situation you find yourself in. Each section is divided into short chapters, which explore discrete elements of the business of project management. Each chapter includes an anecdote from a manager who has been there and done it or a case study fromaprojectwith a valuable lessonto be learnt. For clarity, and also because this book is designed for people without much time to study project management theory extensively, each short chapter covers one discrete point that you can put into practice immediately: you’ll understand both why and how things can be done. Dip into the chapters at random and pick a section, or make your way methodically through the section most relevant to where you are in your project at the moment. If a topic particularly grabs you, flick through the further reading suggestions and references to find ways to take it further.