The US Navy, the US Department of Defense (USDOD) and the 

Software Engineering Institute (SEI) are responsible for giving 

the project management community most of the available 

project management skills which are helping us so much these 

days, but from the originally documented steps required to make

them work, some professionals have inadvertently dropped that

required concerted effort between consultants, contractors and 

subcontractors which render available project management systems

handicapped right at the beginning of the administration effort.

Although project owners and investors are always paying for state-of-the-art consultancy services, they are not usually getting them mostly due false excuses such as:

• Lack of executives training on the subject

• Lack of knowledge on required consultants and contractors' deliverables; 

• Poor contracting practices;

• "Lack of time" statements;

• "it is not needed for this kind of project" statements;

• "I experienced it in another project and it does not work"  statements;

• Hiring the wrong, but cheap, team member;

• Greed to make unusua lprofits while mishandling human resources; 

• "It will add unnecessary costs to the project" statements; and

• "Paperworkcanhandleeverythinganditisverydifferentfromreallife"statements.

When NASA, the largest contracting organization on earth, back in the early 1980's, 

was in a bit of pickle due to corruption scandals on how they conducted projects, 

they call on IBM and McDonnell Douglas to design a system able to control contractors and 

subcontractors properly and more importantly providing the institution with the right to 

know about its investments.

As a result, a program called the Master Scheduling and Control System (MSCS) was 

implemented for computer mainframes. 

Later on, computers lap and desktop adopted the MSCS (a.k.a. earned value analysis) 

approach to come up with outstanding programs like Primavera and MS Project which 

represent the current project management state-of-the-art

reinforced with the use of powerful web-based data services

providers such as Oracle and SQL. 

We certainly hope this book will provide project owners, contractors 

and any kind of project stakeholders enough knowledge on tools and 

techniques that most likely will save them a lot of trouble and more 

importantly a lot of money.