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:

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 to test new approaches and get instant feedback. I fine-tuned the lessons learned from one engagement for the next one and introduced them into my workshops as well. Like an eXtreme project, my model, set out in this book, was undergoing constant change. It still is. After all, in the world of extreme projects, nothing stands still.

What You Can Expect

In this book you will find proven approaches for succeeding with the new breed of eXtreme projects. These are projects that feature two or more of these dynamics:

• High stakes: failure is not an option.

• Deadlines are short.

• Innovation is paramount.

• Success is to be measured in bottom-line results.

• Bureaucracy can't be tolerated.

• Quality of life is important.

This book is not about another panacea methodology and flowchart. Rather, it presents a holistic framework built on an integrated set of principles and shared values and practices. It includes tools that accelerate performance on all three levels essential for success on very demanding projects: self-leadership, project leadership, and organizational agility. The holistic model, people centered, reality based, and business focused, takes the form of the following overall framework:

• The 4 Accelerators (principles for unleashing motivation and innovation)

• The 10 Shared Values (for building trust and confidence)

• The 4 Business Questions (for ensuring that customers receive value early and often)

• The 5 Critical Success Factors (that provide the practices, tools, and infrastructure to succeed)

eXtreme project management encompasses both hard and soft skills. Project management can no longer separate people from projects. The book combines the essential soft (interpersonal) skills with the critical eXtreme project management hard skills.

eXtreme project management is adaptable. To use it successfully, it is important that you apply the overall framework I outlined above. Then, take the element as far as it makes sense.

The Audience for This Book

eXtreme project management is for everyone. Its principles and practices can be used on any project because it strips away all nonessential project management ceremony. I have been gratified to learn that more and more people have been applying the principles and tools covered in this book to manage traditional projects that have been overburdened with excess methodology and documentation.

eXtreme projects level the playing field. This book is written for everyone who touches an eXtreme project. Everyday-business managers are now finding themselves leading, sponsoring, or participating on eXtreme projects. Projects are becoming part of their real job. And project management is becoming a survival skill. That's why I've written eXtreme Project Management in plain English and not in project management technobabble. Besides, those terms wouldn't apply to eXtreme project management anyway. It's a new game.

Both beginners in project management and seasoned practitioners attend my eXtreme Project Management workshops: all are looking for a better way. These include core team members as well as other stakeholders from business functions whose livelihood and departmental objectives depend on successful projects. All of them want to become more project savvy.

There is much in this book for project sponsors who will use it to gain a new understanding of their special role when sponsoring an eXtreme project and how they can best contribute to success. Program managers and heads of project offices will find material they can use to expand their project management offerings to their customer community. And the final chapter is written in the form of a briefing for senior management. As it outlines practices for becoming an agile organization, it addresses one of management's most burning questions: How can we accommodate high change and still have predictability? Senior managers who are ready to eliminate counterproductive organizational practices and replace them with a project environment that is change tolerant and adaptable to all types of projects, from traditional to extreme, will find the final chapter particularly compelling.

If you decide that eXtreme project management is for you, then this book will become your guide. A lot of it will remind you of what you already know. It will enable you to express and extend your natural talents and skills in a way that will have an even greater impact on the lives and projects of those around you. It will help you make heroes and heroines of yourself and others.

In a large sense, this book is intuitive. It is organized common sense, and that's why it works. Unlike traditional project management, eXtreme project management is built around how people are naturally motivated to work instead of being built around a sterile methodology and then trying to force people to conform.

What's Ahead

This book has four parts. Part One describes the reality we face today and explains in greater detail why this reality requires a new mind-set based on the premise that radical change and uncertainty are the norm, not the exception. Part Two focuses on the leadership skills that are critical to success on eXtreme projects, including self-leadership. The job of the eXtreme project manager is to gain and sustain the commitment of others. The successful project manager is able to unleash motivation and innovation, establish the trust and confidence to succeed, and ensure that the customer receives value each step of the way. All of these critical outcomes call for leadership. When eXtreme projects fail, it is most often due to a lack of leadership or poor leadership skills.

Part Three provides a thorough grounding in the flexible project model for eXtreme projects, covering project start-up to project turnover. The model provides just enough discipline to allow people the freedom to innovate and to get work done. The model is iterative and consists of four cycles: Visionate, Speculate, Innovate, Reevaluate, and one final element, Disseminate.

Part Four provides practical guidance on managing the project environment. Communication is critical on eXtreme projects, which require that information be available at any time to anyone who needs it. eXtreme projects also require an agile organization, that is, a change-tolerant, project-friendly culture that recognizes and supports the special needs of different projects from traditional to eXtreme.

The eXtreme Tools and Techniques section at the end of the book is a collection of tools and techniques for use with eXtreme projects. Most of them focus on the essential soft skills of eXtreme project management for improving self-mastery, interpersonal skills, and team leadership and facilitation skills.

No Excuses Project Management

To succeed on today's extreme projects, you can't wait for the organization to get sane, become project friendly, and make your life easer. That would be insane to think so. If you don't believe me, try explaining to your sponsor or customer that the project failed because they doubled the scope, cut the time line in half, and continually made changes to the plan.

This book will help you succeed under any circumstances, even if it means that you decide you have to walk away from an impossible project. What greater success than to be true to yourself?

If there's one thing I've learned after being around projects for thirty-five years, and in particular the past eight years, eXtreme project management boils down to just one word: courage. Courage to do things right. And courage to do the right things.

The principles and tools in this book will get you up to speed. But only you can get up the courage to use them. You don't need permission from anybody to begin to apply this approach and to make a difference.

Burnsville, North Carolina

August 2004

Doug DeCarlo