Many students and practitioners will welcome the 5th Edition of this well established and respected text book. This new edition acknowledges that construction is becoming more sophisticated and more difficult to manage and starts to move away from the traditional approach favoured in earlier editions towards a more uncertain future. Some discussion of chaos and complexity is included but no systematic project management methodologies proposed.

This edition is based on a systems approach to organisational structure and analysis, as was the case in previous editions, with the first four chapters providing the basic theory for the book. The major stakeholders, the client and the project management team form the basis for the next two chapters. The book then concludes with five broader chapters covering, the construction process, authority-power-politics, project leadership, organisation structures and the analysis and design of project management structures respectively.

Within this format many of the chapters have been updated or re-written to include new and/or increasingly relevant issues. The treatment of sustainability is a good example of this trend. Within Chapter 4 on systems thinking a section on sustainability and environmental uncertainty has been incorporated. The section covers the broad principles outlining the need for an approach to projects based on sustainable development concepts. This thread is then picked up in the next chapter on Clients and referred to in the project management sections later in the book.

This book will be of value for existing practitioners and to new students. The first chapter contains a thorough but concise overview of construction project management which forms an excellent introduction. Overall the book is mainly concerned with understanding aspects of project management for general building and construction from an organisational and systems viewpoint. The new edition keeps readers in touch with current practice in this rapidly evolving area.

Professor NJ Smith

March 2008