Project management is widely used in the construction industry and is central to planning and controlling time, costs and resources. This book enables readers to perform more effectively, to understand project planning and control procedures and to gain an insight into the associated skills. Numerous case examples from diverse industries and exercises support and illustrate important concepts. The result is a new perspective for project managers: planning can be shown to be a systems synthesis or an inverse problem, which provides a way to reach a satisfactory solution, avoiding the time-consuming or impractical search for the optimal solution.