A common-sense guide to real-world project management

Common sense isn't always commonly practiced. Anyone who's ever worked on a project in a technical setting knows this. Indeed, much of working with others consists of solving unexpected problems and learning from mistakes along the way.

It Sounded Good When We Started: A Project Manager's Guide to Working with People on Projects provides essential reading for project managers trying to understand the trials and triumphs that can arise in any project setting. The authors, both respected project managers with sixty years of experience between them, describe their own mistakes as well as the many valuable lessons they drew from them. Instead of trying to formulate these in abstract theory, Phillips and O’Bryan tell the stories surrounding a particular project, providing a more memorable, real-world, and practical set of examples.

Written in a distinctly nontechnical style, this is a general troubleshooting guide for people who work on projects together. As such, its content proves useful in many different settings and applies to many different kinds of endeavors. Most of the stories are about problems—since it's the problems we often remember more than the successes—and what was learned from them. After describing a given problem, the authors analyze the issues that led to it and work towards various ways they've discovered to create a better project environment, one where problems get solved easier and happen less frequently.

It Sounded Good When We Started offers a highly readable go-to for engineers, scientists, computer professionals, and anyone working on specialized, collaborative projects.

DWAYNE PHILLIPS, PhD, has worked as a systems and computer engineer for the U.S. government since 1980. He performed liaison work with foreign governments, developed and maintained software, and for most of the past twelve years has managed projects. He is the author of The Software Project Manager's Handbook: Principles that Work at Work, also from Wiley.

ROY O'BRYAN has over forty-two years on the leading edge of technology, developing software and hardware systems. A former Senior Executive Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, O'Bryan has worked for the past thirteen years for Northrop Grummon as a Senior Staff Engineer providing technical and management assistance to a number of government programs.

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This is a book about project management, not as it should be, but as it is: confused, satisfying, creative, mundane, exciting, demanding and chaotic. Built around the authors' adventures with a real, large scale project named Delphi, one feels as if she/he is working with the them and their very human cohorts as they cope with problems of enormous complexity.

The chapter titles themselves should give a flavor of the book:
"Digging Yourself into a Hole,""Going Where Angels Fear to Tread: There Is No Right Way to Do the Wrong Thing," and "A Charlatan in Expert's Clothing: Writing a Lie - The Proposal..."
being typical examples.

Each chapter concludes with "clinical" phrases such as, "The Dog Ate My Plan" or "I Wasn't Involved," that serve as warnings, in everyday language, that something is amiss. The warnings are then followed by very useful "bullets" that suggest ways for coping with the "dog" or the excuses one gives for his/her participation in a phase of the project that ended in failure.

A highly readable book, it should be of interest to all people who are engaged in project management, whether the project involves creating a piece of multi-million dollar electronic equipment or planning a extended family reunion of relatives who are ambivalent about getting together.

4 of 4 found the following review helpful:

These Guys Have "Been There and Done That."May 17, 2004

Excellent material, well written and cogently organized. Reads like a Steve McConnell book, but at a more general "Project Management" level instead of "Software Project Management". Loaded with funny (in hind sight *grin*) stories that make the major points very memorable.

I related to many of the stories (they read very much like AntiPatterns), and I gained important insights into a current critical project -- which is having immediate positive impact on my current planning and actions.

Very glad I read this book in time.

Strongly recommend this book for current and future project/program leaders!

1 of 2 found the following review helpful:

Good Techniques in ContextJan 28, 2008
By C. K. Ray "agile sw developer"
Many of the techniques used in this book's hardware/software waterfall project to make it succeed, are also used in agile software development to help them succeed. People skills, frequent feedback, keeping in touch with reality. I loved the humor and compassion exhibited by the authors. I recommend this to practitioners of Scrum, Extreme Programming, and other agile methods to provide a perspective on a real-life waterfall project and problems common to all development projects.