Dennis Lock, Honorary Fellow, APM (1929-2023)

Dennis Lock, APM Fellow (FAPM), born on 15 September 1929 in Wembley, London died peacefully at his home on 6 May 2023.  Dennis will be remembered for his extraordinary body of writing, as an author and an editor – he edited a selection of APM publications.

Born to humble beginnings, Dennis left school at 15 and went on to have a career of exceptionally wide management and industrial experience, ranging from the manufacture of sub-miniature electronic assemblies to giant machine-tool projects and mining engineering.  He worked in defence, heavy engineering and mining.

Most recently Dennis was an external lecturer in project management for the master’s degree programmes for Southampton and Surrey University.

The first edition of his seminal textbook, Project Management, was published by Gower Publishing in the late 1960s and is still in print, with the 10^th edition published in 2013. 

His final book, The Practitioner Handbook of Project Controls, which he co-edited with Shane Forth, was published in 2021. Perhaps his crowning achievement was as an editor of definitive multi-author references both in the field of project and programme management and on general management. He was the editor of several volumes of Gower’s flagship Handbook of Management - itself a groundbreaking book - and the first editor of several volumes of the Gower Handbook of Project Management, before Professor Rodney Turner took on that role.

Following a 56 year marriage to Gladys Shilling, sister of Beatrice Shilling the famous aeronautical engineer and motorcycle and motor car racer, at 85 Dennis met and married Jane Vamos and inherited a new family, including four stepchildren.  He continued to work on Project Management well into his ninth decade. Dennis died peacefully at home on 6 May 2023 with his wife at his side.

Bibliography, Dennis Lock

Authored:

• Project Management (10 editions) (1970)
• Directors’ Guide to Management Techniques (1972)
• Project Planner (1990)
• Essentials of Project Management (Four editions) (1996)
• Project Management in Construction (2004)
• Naked Project Management (2013)

Co-authored:

• Advanced Project Management, Second Edition, with F L Harrison (2004)
• Accelerating Business and IT Change, with Alan Fowler (2006)
• Aviation Project Management, with Triant G. Flouris (2016)
• Managing Aviation Projects from Concept to Completion, with Triant G. Flouris (2016)

Edited volumes:

• Engineer’s Handbook of Management Techniques (1973)
• Financial Management of Production (1975)
• Factory Administration Handbook (1976)
• Gower Handbook of Project Management (Two editions) (1987)
• Gower Handbook of Quality Management (1990)
• Handbook of Engineering Management (1993)

Co-edited volumes:

• Gower Handbook of Management, with Nigel Farrow (Four Editions) (1983)
• Gower Handbook of People in Project Management, with Lindsay Scott (2013)
• Gower Handbook of Programme Management, Second Edition, with Reinhard Wagner (2016)
• The Handbook of Project Portfolio Management, with Reinhard Wagner (2018)
• The Practitioner Handbook of Project Controls, with Shane Forth (2020)