ادای احترام ما به رادنی و اهمیت مدیریت پروژه هدف گرا Our tribute to Rodney – And the importance of Goal Directed Project Management

1. In the beginning Rodney Turner has had great success within the academic field of project management. This issue of IJPM is celebrating his achievements. But how did it all start? We will highlight in this article that in some ways, we contributed significantly to getting Rodney interested in an academic career. To explain how, we need to go back to 1984. We (Erling and Kristoffer), together with Tor Haug, had published a book on project management in Norway. It differed from traditional textbooks at that time, which focused on waterfall models and activity planning. Instead our work advocated topdown planning; focus on the results (goals) you want to achieve. The book was successful in Norway, and the authors were of course eager to have it published in English. Rodney started his education in Auckland, New Zealand and finished by getting his DPhil in Engineering Science at Oxford University, UK. He was introduced to project management while working for ICI Agricultural Division as a mechanical engineer and project manager in the petrochemical industry. By the mid 1980s, Rodney was working as a management consultant for Coopers and Lybrand and doing consultancy work across many industries. At this time in Norway, Kristoffer and Tor had started a management consultancy firm which entered into partnership with the Norwegian branch of Coopers and Lybrand. Erling was pursuing an academic career and ended up as Professor at the University of Bergen and later at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo. Through Coopers and Lybrand, the three Norwegian authors connected with Rodney and asked if he might be willing to work on an English version of the book, checking the translation and making his own impression on the text. Rodney agreed, and in 1987 Goal Directed Project Management was published by Kogan Page (Andersen et al., 1987). The book is often referred to as GDPM. After the book was published, Rodney and the three Norwegian authors wrote an article in IJPM to give an overview of the main ideas of the book (Turner et al., 1988).