Idea 37 - Project management There are more lawyers, accountants and business school graduates in top management these days, and fewer engineers. The engineer as business manager is in eclipse, along with the shrinking weight of manufacturing in developed economies. Yet there is much that managers can and do learn from the down-and-dirty business of project management, in planning complex projects and forcing them through to conclusion. A project is very different to a process. A process carries out the same function again and again to yield a product or a service. A project is a one- off undertaking, with a clear beginning and end, usually aimed at creating some useful change or adding value - typically to build a new plant or create a new product. The skills needed to complete a project successfully are not those required to manage a process, and so project management has evolved as a discipline of its own. Projects bring together resources such as people, money a...