Project Management: The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course
Book

Project Management: The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course

Karen Tate and Helen Cooke
McGraw-Hill, 2005
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Unlike many books on project management, which tend to be sand-dune dry, this textbook for McGraw-Hill's 36-hour project management course has interesting narrative elements. The focus is on project management skills, but you also will learn about fascinating historic projects and obstacles their builders encountered. However, this book would have benefited from more disciplined editorial direction. For example, some of the closing chapters would probably help the reader more if they were presented earlier. However, the quirky sequencing doesn't diminish the informational deliverables. The convenient chapter summaries and the self-tests at the end of each chapter will help you stay on schedule. getAbstract believes professional and up-and-coming project managers will find that reading this book is a worthwhile project.

Summary

Historical Projects

The need to plan and execute highly complex projects is nothing new. Indeed, project management strategies and techniques can be found in the records of the ancient Chinese war lords as recorded by Sun Tzu, as well as in the work of Machiavelli.

The ancient people who built Egypt's great pyramids undertook a mammoth project management task. Scientists say 20,000 workers labored about 20 years to complete the Great Pyramid at Giza. The task required technology, skilled techniques and tons of raw materials. Workers used wooden beams as levers, and hauled loads of wet sand to construct surfaces for sliding multi-ton stone blocks off their pallets. By one estimate, building the Giza pyramid consumed more than three million work-years of labor.

In more recent times, the construction of the United States’ railroad system required 10,000 workers pounding away around the clock to install two or three miles of track per day. Each rail weighed 700 pounds. Massive modern project management initiatives in the U.S. include the Polaris submarine program, NASA's Apollo space program that landed men on the moon, the Space Shuttle program and the development...

About the Authors

Helen S. Cooke, M.A., P.M.P., is a frequent speaker who heads a Chicago project management consultancy. She has managed more than 50 projects and has more than two decades of project management experience. Karen Tate, M.B.A., P.M.P., is president and founder of a Cincinnati, Ohio, project management consulting firm. She is on the board of the Project Management Institute.

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