This book provides an effective overall approach and concrete action strategies to help readers quickly grasp key aspects of project management and reduce the pressure during the learning process, so that they can soon start enjoying the fruits of successful project management. The problems discussed in this book have been drawn both from several years of theoretical research on the part of the author, and from communications between the author and hundreds of business executives and project managers from many domestic and international EMBA and CEO classes. The book’s unique content is written in an easy-to-follow tone with typical Chinese systemic and dialectical thinking, intended to help readers find the appropriate way to solve problems as they encounter them. One of the popular misunderstandings about project management is to make project managers to take most of the responsibilities for project success, i.e. senior managers in companies usually think project management is not their business. This book puts project management in business context to eliminate this misunderstanding and demonstrates that: only if the senior managers recognize the value of projects and play their roles in project governance and project management right, their companies can survive and develop in the changing society. In order to solve the contradiction between the uniqueness of a project and the efficiency/reliability of its management, this book examines, based on Chinese dial ectical logic, the basic preparation needed for successful project management, including how to use unified principles to manage projects with different characteristics, how to create company-wide project governance infrastructure to make project managers to be able to take their management responsibilities, and how to establish effective relationships among project stakeholders to make unique projects to be manageable structured partner social networks, etc. This book explains how to deal with the key contradictions existing in each phase of a project, from project decision-making to close-out. This book is basically for both top managers of companies and project managers, so it addresses many challenges companies and project managers will have to face in the changing society, and provides essential strategies and methods for overcoming them. This book is not an another book to talk about project management knowledge or successful project management stories, it is about basic project thinking and corresponding insights to deal with key common issues in projects, which are essential to manage projects and even companies reliably in the changing and unreliable society.
