Incredibly Easy Project Management: A Mildly Heretical Perspective

Despair of management practices, especially poor communication, through fifty-odd years of bottom-to-top experience led Norman Willoughby to begin a monograph on communication through charts and diagrams. This quickly outgrew its theme and became Incredibly Easy Project Management. Nothing has happened to shake his belief that management is not all that difficult if we pay attention to a few, seemingly simplistic, fundamentals.

Norman has practised exclusively as a project manager and project management consultant for the past thirty years. Before that, starting as an apprentice civil engineer, then surveying in Canada and Venezuela, he worked in positions of increasing responsibility in design and construction including as managing director of a construction company in Jamaica and president and general manager of a project management consultancy in Ottawa.

As a project manager, he has directed a diverse range of projects for the Government: shipping Canadian cattle to Nicaragua; a farm-worker housing program in Costa Rica; a railway rehabilitation program in Tanzania; management monitoring of an educational project in Fiji; for private enterprise: a proposal for a seaquarium in Panama; as Contracts Manager on a design/build fifty-six million dollar Transport Canada Training Institute; a tourist development in the Republic of Honduras where he, his wife, their ocelot and house-cat were lucky to survive Hurricane Fifi ....... unfortunately, the project drowned! He has also advised property developers in Portugal and construction companies in various countries.

Amongst many tasks as a consultant sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency, he developed aid-agency management structures, institutional evaluations, conducted a seminar in project management for the Palestine Health Authority and contributed to a strategic development plan.

Norman now practises as a management consultant in Victoria.