How Not to Fail at Projects

Stopping the Project Management Insanity Spiral

This book aims to analyze the reasons for failure in project management. It is filled with stories, anecdotes and satires that highlight how organizations and project managers fall into an “insanity spiral”. It provides Sanity Checks designed to keep project managers from repeating the same mistakes and to help them become project champions.

They say that repeating the same thing and expecting a different result is insanity. This book aims to analyze the reasons for failure in project management. It is filled with stories, anecdotes and satires that highlight how organizations and project managers fall into an “insanity spiral”. It provides seven Sanity Checks designed to keep project managers from repeating the same mistakes and to help them become project champions:

1. The first sanity check is how and when to appoint a project manager. This first sanity check may be familiar and may well bring back memories of starting a career in project management.
2. The second sanity check is the comprehension of why a project is needed. It helps to overcome the misunderstanding that many have on the nature of projects and its management.
3. The third sanity check is the understanding of the unknown and emphasizes the importance of risk management.
4. The fourth sanity check is capturing who needs what. It is about the constant pursuit to satisfy a host of individuals and at times the, sometimes seemingly, unsurmountable quest to secure resources for a project.
5. The fifth sanity check is who does what. It also deals with satisfying stakeholders and obtaining resources.
6. The sixth sanity check is outside assistance. It is all about breaking the us versus them syndrome when outsourcing in a project.
7. The seventh and most important sanity check is engaging the efforts of others as it deals with people—the lifeblood of any organization.

The book concludes with a chapter on composing and building powerful microservices. With the exponential growth of IoT devices, microservices are being developed and deployed on resource-constrained but resource-intensive devices in order to provide people-centric applications. The book discusses the challenges of these applications. Finally, the book looks at the role of microservices in smart environments and upcoming trends including ubiquitous yet disappearing microservices.

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