Introduction

On a recent trip to London, I was amazed as my cabbie, Steve, nudged forward into the face of three lanes of oncoming traffic to cross a busy intersection that we had been waiting at for over five minutes. “Only a cabbie could pull that off,” I commented, as we avoided potential accidents. Steve laughed and replied, “I have been driving cabs for 23 years. We cabbies have a term. We use the road. Other people drive but we use the road.”

By bending rules, taking calculated risks, and using his experience of the many roads, lanes, and alleys of London, Steve made the journey faster, more efficiently, and safer by using rather than driving on the road.

Later I thought about the difference between “using the road” and “driving on the road” and the difference between eXtreme project management and traditional proj ect management.

For people faced with too many projects, projects that seem to change every day, not enough good people, and not enough time and money, eXtreme project management is about using the road.

Why Should You Read This Book?

The simple answer to this question is for you to answer a couple of other questions:

	Yes	No
I have a completely stable and realistic project plan.
My organization has a stable strategic plan.
My stakeholders are fully committed to my project.
My sponsor is fully effective and available to me quickly.
I have a completely clear statement of scope and objectives.
My team is loyal and devoted to the project.
We have effective risk and quality management plans.
My organization understands project management.
I have access to a group of expert project managers.
I have all the tools, technology, and techniques I need.
My project and organization are not changing rapidly.

If you answered “Yes” to all these questions, this book should be used to raise your Project Manager of the Century award higher for all to see and envy. If you answered “No” to any of these questions, this book will help you get a perfect score.

This book is about a new and radical approach to managing projects and teams—project management (XPM). It represents a quantum leap in project management.

Our group has been developing, implementing, and refining this approach over the past 25 years. This new project management approach is not based on academic theories or esoteric models. Rather, it has been forged through the experience of thousands of hours of practical experience in hundreds of real projects. The projects have been in virtually all sectors of business—most government areas, insurance, banking, health, computing software, information technology (IT) hardware and IT services, research and development, retail services, policy development, and manufacturing.

What Makes This Book Different?

eXtreme project management is fundamentally different from mainstream and traditional project management approaches.

eXtreme Project Management Test

To show the radical difference between eXtreme project management and traditional project management, let's explore the answers to this question: How do you determine the progress of a project?

The traditional project management answers to this question include:

• Is the project meeting agreed deadlines?

• Is the project in budget?

• Have there been changes to the scope and objectives?

Indeed, most project management systems are based on reports only on budget and deadline compliance.

eXtreme project management adopts a completely different approach to measuring project success and progress:

• Are stakeholders being informed and consulted about project status?

• Have there been unapproved changes to scope and objectives?

• Are the cost and benefits assumptions still valid?

• Has the agreed product quality been compromised?

• Are project risks unchanged?

• Is the sponsor completely aware of the project status?

• Are the team members satisfied with the project?

In effect, traditional project management looks inward and downward whereas, eXtreme project management looks outward and upward.

Over the past 25 years, we have studied and researched project management and related topics from as many perspectives as possible. We have read every book (currently more than 100) and article (many hundreds) on project management we can find. We have searched the Internet and have attended meetings of professional project management groups such as the Project Management Institute and the Australian Institute of Project Management. In addition, we have discussed our views and models with more than 20,000 project managers in our workshop series.

The longer we look, the more we are convinced that most published project management material has missed the mark. Either the models are too basic and simplistic or too theoretical and complex. In many cases, they are just unrealistic. For example, many project management texts suggest that you have to acquire and implement complex system or project development methodologies (at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars). Critical management issues such as quality, benefits realization, and risk were either completely ignored or plugged in as afterthoughts.

Sometimes we wonder whether the author or expert even lives on the same planet that we do! Their world seems so organized, so rational, so structured, and so devoid of the complex interpersonal politics we see every day in our clients that we wonder whether we have a distorted view of reality.

However, 20,000 people cannot be wrong. Our workshop participants do live on the same planet as we do and in the same world of complex organization dynamics.

Traditional project management approaches reflect the engineering and construction models of project management. They are based on a set of assumptions that are increasingly irrelevant in the chaotic and ambiguous world of organizations facing the new millennium. Concepts such as fixed requirements, long development time frames, stable teams and technology, and passive involvement of project stakeholders who trust their expert project managers have become historical myths.

Our new project management approach has been continuously refined and expanded to reflect the realities of the new business paradigm. It is based on a different set of assumptions that include dynamic requirements, compressed development schedules, virtual teams, unstable technology, and total involvement of project stakeholders. Our project management approach is totally focused on the analysis, measurement, and realization of financial benefits from the project, managing the total whole-of-life project cycle, complete integration of quality issues, and proactive project risk management.

We have evolved our project management approach to be as simple as it can be and as complex as it needs to be.

In his terrific book, Management of the Absurd, Richard Frason (1996) described how James Watt saw something that millions of other people had also seen but “not seen.” It was Watt's observation of how steam coming from his tea kettle could be used to power steam engines that sparked the Industrial Revolution. Watt also saw the “invisible obvious” that so many others could not.

So much of this book is about the invisible obvious. Time and time again throughout this book, you'll find yourself saying “Of course! Why didn't I think of that? It's so obvious. It is so simple.”

However, as Richard Riodan said when he was mayor of Los Angeles, “Simple and easy aren't the same words.”^[1]

^[1] We caught Riodan making this wonderful distinction between the simple statement “We should eliminate all gangs” with the not-so-easy task of implementing it on a TV news broadcast in 1992.

Most important, as we first stated in 1981 in People and Project Management (1981) and in Third Wave Project Management (Thomsett, 1992), our project management approach is totally focused on people and the relationships among the many people involved in projects.

People, not resources or users, work on projects.

What This Book Is Not About

This book is not about how to develop work breakdown structures and project schedules. It is not about developing simplistic and mechanical models such as project plans (which are never followed anyway). Most important, it is not boring. Many of the project management books that we have read present project management as some dry, cold, and quasi-scientific “pursuit.”

We totally reject this view of project management. Our experience is that project management is one of the most challenging, creative, and exciting activities you can undertake. We hope that this is reflected in this book.

The Structure of the Book

To assist our readers who are under eXtreme project deadlines and working conditions, we have structured the book into three parts for quick access.

Part 1—eXtreme Concepts

This covers the background to XPM. We look at the evolution of project management, the emerging project environment, and the forces driving the need for XPM.

Part 2—eXtreme Tools

This introduces the XPM tools such as RAP sessions, learning loops, success sliders, and the detailed techniques used in XPM planning and tracking.

Part 3—Additional Resources

This includes readings that provide further tips; advanced tools; and related issues such as project sponsorship, negotiation, communication, ethics, and other critical project management concerns. There are additional readings available on our Web site www.thomsett.com.au

Each part is related but they can be read independently if you are in a hurry; though we hope you get to read the entire book eventually. Great project managers will read all of this book.

During our journey as consultants to major organizations, we have seen many strange and wonderful things. In many cases, what we observed put the bizarre events in the series The X Files to shame. At the end of the chapters in Part 2, we have included a section called The P Files (where P represents people or politics). The P Files entries support the points raised in the associated chapter.

A Note on Terminology

Throughout this book we refer to business projects. This term includes all the typical elements of business process redesign and development, new policy development, IT development, and change management. Readers who have either a business or IT background will find the concepts and techniques relevant. After all, there is no such thing as an IT project. eXtreme projects embrace and include all aspects of business, IT, policy, administration, human resources, change, and research effort that all projects should include. We also do not use the term user, which we dislike intensely, to refer to non-technical people. As we explain in the next chapter, this term has been used to marginalize and diminish the critical role that business experts and clients play in contemporary projects.