Book excerpt: This is an introductory guide to the world of project management from one of the world's most accomplished project managements authors. Lock explains in pragmatic and jargon-free terms how projects work and how to run them. Books about project management are plentiful. The best of those books are too comprehensive for the person faced for the first time with managing a small and relatively straightforward project, or for the student studying for a degree or business qualification in which project management is only one of several modules. But, at the other extreme too many of the simpler books treat project management lightly, gloss over or ignore some essential processes, and even get the facts wrong and give incorrect examples.