ABSTRACT
Imagine yourself as a project manager, having to start a very simple project. You might begin with a task list (a kind of shopping list of what has to be done) and simply work down the list until the project is finished. That approach is fine when the task list contains only 10 or 20 entries. But most projects contain hundreds of tasks and some will progress through many thousands of different tasks before they are done. Therefore, after familiarizing yourself with the project definition, your first job as project manager is to organize all these tasks in some logical way that will allow them to be scheduled for time and costs, and allocated to all the various people and managers across the project organization. Put another way, the previous three chapters have described the ways in which people might be organized to carry out the project, and now we have reached the stage in the project life history when we must consider how the work itself should be organized.
