Chris Croft (author)

Chris Croft (born 12 February 1960) is a British author, video-maker and public speaker. He is the author of 16 books and 60 video courses, which have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese and French. He is known for teaching Project Management with a particular love of Gantt charts, and also for his interest in happiness.
== Early Life and Education ==
Chris Croft was born on 12 February 1960 to Christopher Croft, an English Captain (naval) and commodoreand, and Brit Croft, a norwegian. He was brought up in Hampshire and attended Durlston Court School as a boarder from the age of 8, followed by Sherborne School and then University of Cambridge where he studied Engineering at Queens' College, Cambridge. Later he took an MBA.
== Career ==
Chris Croft is based in Poole, England. His first job was at Westland Helicopters in Yeovil where he was a technologist apprentice, then a Production Engineer, and moved into management, He then worked as operations manager at DRG in Bristol, Corvus in Cwmbran, and Dolphin Packaging in Poole. He then moved to Bournemouth University as a lecturer in operations management, before beginning his self employed career in 1997.
Since then he has run 3000 courses and trained over 87,000 people face to face. He has also been writing and recording video courses for linkedin learning (originally Lynda.com) and Udemy where he has a total of 60 courses, 20,000 views a day, and 15 million views in total. He is one of the top authors on linkedin learning, mainly for Project Management, and one of the best selling management authors on udemy.com – particularly for Negotiation, Leadership and Sales but also Time Management, Assertiveness Careers and Happiness.
Chris Croft has created many unique ideas and models, particularly his Five Options For When You Don’t Have Enough Time, his three additions to the important/urgent matrix, his spiral graph of Achievement, Stress and Quality of Life, his Gantt of Gantts for viewing multiple projects at once his six career options and his six lifestyles illustrated by six animals, his model of management style based on combinations of Monitoring and Support, and his Jobs To Do app which has sliders for size and fun as well as urgency and importance. His Project Management Quickstart Guide contains new ideas on the definition of Schedule Performance Index, how to calculate the optimum level of contingency, and why it’s important to use both network diagrams and Gantt charts in conjunction when planning a project.
Most of his books are self published but Time Management was published originally by Routledge in 1996, now Cengage Learning, and Project Management Quickstart Guide is published by ClydeBank Media (2022).
== Other work ==
In 2020 he founded the World Happiness Project with Gerry Clarke.
In 2021 he began a project to give his video courses for free to local schools as a careers planning resource and to help young people prepare for the world of work.
In 2021 he began work on Mr Gantt, a unique software-based approach to running projects at the same time as learning about project management, using the software and the embedded videos.
Category:1960 births
Category:British writers
Category:British public speakers