P R E FA C E When the lunar module Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility at 13 hours, 19 minutes, 39.9 seconds Eastern Standard Time on July 20, 1969, the event was hailed as one of history's major milestones. It was also one of the most fascinating and significant spin-offs of the U.S. space program and was the development of flexible yet precise organizational structures, forms, and tools that allowed people to work together to reach challenging goals. Out of that grew the modern concept of project management. Since the Apollo days, project management, applicable both to individual endeavors and to a series of projects called programs, has been applied to many new fields of activity. With the trend toward accelerated change, the scope of project management has expanded from construction projects and aerospace to encompass organizational change, R&D projects, high-tech product development, banking and finance, nonprofit services, environmental remediation--in fact, just about every field of human endeavor. When it first appeared in 1993, the handbook was a major contribution to the field, pulling together expert practitioners to share their advice on topics such as designing adequate organizational structures, generating and maintain teamwork, and managing the project life cycle. The second edition, released in 2005, was designed to complement and supplement the PMBOK ® Guide, Third Edition, and to provide supporting materials for those preparing to take the certification exam or working to maintain their certification. We have retained this feature, updating the chapters in Section One to the new standard, the PMBOK ® Guide, Fourth Edition. As in the second edition, we have retained many of the original authors, keeping those chapters that stand as classics in the field. However, with the pace of change, we have also eliminated a few chapters that had become dated in order to include new developments in the discipline. As a brief overview, the third edition changes comprise: · One hundred percent of the chapters have had editorial revisions. xiii American Management Association www.amanet.org