Preface: Out of the Darkness

This is a book about a new way to understand and manage the kind of projects that the world is throwing at us today. It is the result of an eight-year journey through frustration, failure, and discovery. Until 1996, I had been preaching the gospel according to TPM (traditional project management) as I knew it, and it wasn't working. I had been so busy teaching and consulting that it had not dawned on me that the world of projects had changed and I hadn't kept up.

A New Breed of Project

At the time, I was running into more and more projects that didn't fit the mold I was brought up in. These new projects were chaotic. They featured high change, high speed, and high stress. They were expected to adjust continually to sudden competitive threats, new technologies, changes in government regulations, or late-breaking information about customer needs. Sometimes the project sponsor simply had a provocative idea that would require going back to the drawing boards (but wouldn't allow the schedule to change).

The stakes were high for many of these projects. They would have an important impact on how the organization did business-for instance, moving a line of financial products into a Web environment in order to give customers and prospects direct access.

Many of these new breed projects were also politically charged: jobs would change or be eliminated, or sacred cows would be slain. They tended to create winners and losers. Not only were such projects organizationally complex, they were often technically complex as well, being built around new technologies.

On top of all this, more and more projects I encountered were dependent on geographically dispersed teams, making communication difficult and loyalty to the project a major challenge. Within this setting, I was confronted with client organizations that practiced project du jour, launching more projects than could ever be staffed. People were spread thin, and project managers were left in the lurch.

Adding fuel to the fire, many projects did not have a strong business rationale behind them or a strong business sponsor who would champion the project and eliminate barriers. It is no wonder I saw project managers leading lives that vacillated between quiet and frantic desperation. The impact of all this was high risk, high failure rates, chronic crunch time, and poor quality of life both on and off the job.

Why would anybody want to live this way?

More of the Same Doesn't Work

Under these circumstances, how does one succeed? I thought the answer was to promote more and better planning, so that's what I preached and taught. Yet, no matter how well thought out the plan, it would be obsolete as soon as the client hit the Print key. I learned that Microsoft Project and other such packages were excellent scheduling tools for writing fiction.

In a desperate attempt to control the uncontrollable, I had jumped on the bandwagon and became a big proponent of putting in place more robust project management methodology. I advocated the use of more templates, more control procedures and policies, and conformance to strict standards, all in the hopes of getting a grip on these difficult projects. But as I found out, all this bureaucracy backfired. It simply added more documentation and paperwork and effectively put an already energy-starved project in a straitjacket, if not a coma.

I wasn't alone in this lunacy. I witnessed project offices that would, with the best of intentions, bring in new methods, templates, and software tools in their effort to bring order to chaos. Bureaucracy and monumental methodologies abounded in a futile attempt to gain control over chaos, but they served only to stifle innovation and adaptability. Things were getting worse instead of better.

Organizations realized something still wasn't working. The answer that they came up with usually turned out to be project management training. People would be sent off en masse to training and certificate programs in the hopes of teaching them how to corral these renegade projects. This made little impact as far as I could see.

Despite the chaos and uncertainty surrounding these projects, management wanted to be able to turn on a dime and at the same time demanded that project managers provide accurate projections. While all this was happening, everybody was losing sight of the bottom line. Projects that were brought in by the due date either missed the intended customer need or if they did meet it, there was no way the project would give a satisfactory return on the investment. In the panic to deliver something, people had lost sight of the main idea: the purpose of a project is to make money.

In the process, people were working fifty- to sixty-hour weeks, burning out. A better quality of life seemed inconceivable.

I had been conditioned by traditional project management dogma and therefore kept looking at the world through the wrong lens: I was trying to force-fit projects and the world into my passé paradigm. It was an insurmountable task. Looking back, I can see the face of reality watching in amusement and at times even laughing hysterically at our futile attempts to get it to obey our grandiose plans and elaborate control procedures.

I had failed to notice that a new breed of projects had been born: eXtreme projects. These eXtreme projects disobeyed the classical TPM model whether I liked it or not.

Searching for New Answers

I began to discuss my observations with clients and colleagues. The breakthrough came when I finished reading Ralph Stacey's book, Managing the Unknowable (1992). A week later, I had a series of catalytic insights, revelations that would change everything:

1. Traditional project management is about managing the known, but eXtreme project management is about managing the unknown.
2. You don't manage the unknown the same way you manage the known.
3. No matter what I did, I wasn't going to change the circumstances surrounding the new breed of projects. Nobody was going to. Reality rules.
4. To succeed, I had to adapt.

As my eyes opened, I began to see reality for what it was. I soon found that I wasn't alone. I just thought I was. I learned that reality was also whispering in the ears of many others, and they too were beginning to awaken. I used my workshops and keynote speeches in the United States and Canada to search out project managers who were looking for new answers. Here and there I found project managers who were gaining the courage to start throwing out the old rules and tools. They worked in a wide variety of industries (pharmaceutical, biotech, manufacturing, federal and state government, insurance, finance, health care, food and beverage, construction, entertainment) and were applying eXtreme project management principles to many types of projects (software development, e-commerce, process reengineering, new product development, business mergers, information technology rollouts, telecommunications installations, sales generation and organizational change initiatives).

Reality was also whispering to members of the project management establishment, gurus such as Jim Lewis and Bob Wysocki, who were beginning to question the effectiveness of traditional methods applied to new breed projects. Harvey Levine, a renowned expert in the use of project management tools and former president of the Project Management Institute, sent me an e-mail in which he admitted to throwing up his hands. "I'm engaged in mental gymnastics about what to do about project environments that do not allow for the highly structured approaches of traditional project management." Levine then went on to address this quandary in his recent book: Practical Project Management: Tactics, Tips, and Tools (2002), where he describes methods of applying traditional project management concepts in simplified ways that cut to the chase and do not require a full-blown project management culture and infrastructure.

No, I wasn't alone. The Cutter Consortium, a prestigious information and consulting firm for information technology professionals, invited me to join what is now known as their Agile Project Management practice. The practice consists of luminaries in software development who, under the leadership of Jim Highsmith, have joined together to reinvent project management practices to meet the challenges of today's change-driven, fast-paced information systems projects.

Even the construction industry, the bastion of traditional project management, was getting the word. In "Reforming Project Management: The Role of Lean Construction," authors Gregory Howell and Lauri Koskela hold nothing back. They open their paper with these words: "Project management as taught by professional societies and applied in current practice must be reformed because it is inadequate today and its performance will continue to decline as projects become more uncertain, complex and pressed for speed. Project management is failing because of flawed assumptions and idealized theory. . ."

Encouraged by the turning of the tide, if not a sea change, I turned my journey to reinvent project management into a problem to be solved: keeping an eXtreme project in control and delivering bottom-line results in the face of volatility and maintain an acceptable quality of life on and off the job. This book shows you how to do this.

In solving the problem, my workshops and clients became my laboratory. Both venues enabled me...