Acknowledgments

It starts at home: we’re grateful to our wives, Sharon and Jean, for putting up with not only the time commitment but also the usual gnashing of teeth and incoherent grumbling that accompany the process of figuring out what we want to say, how we want to say it, and in what order so it makes some semblance of sense.

As someone who has read or plans to read the book in front of you, you should be even more appreciative than we are of, in alphabetical order (first name), Andy Gebhard, Anita Cas-sidy, Chad Hagedorn, Harold Knutson, Jonathon Kass, Kelly Williams, Max Fritzler, Mike Benz, and Tony Carangelo.

These fine folks, who live the principles we wrote about here, patiently reviewed each chapter as we produced it to help us make sure we explained our thinking effectively, point out what we’d missed entirely, and, on occasion, diplomatically suggest that some of our dulcet prose should be simply excised from the text.

This work is immeasurably better for their participation, and if you liked reading it, they deserve quite a lot of the credit.

Speaking of reviewers, we need to thank Mike McNair and Candace Sinclair, the professional readers to whom our editors assigned the thankless task of reading our completed manuscript and suggesting ways to improve the overall narrative. You have them to thank for the chapter summaries and action plans. Also, to the extent the overall flow of the book makes sense, you have them to thank for much of that too.

From Dave, a shout-out to Bill Domings, now retired and formerly of McDonald Consulting. Bill was instrumental in showing Dave the power of multifunctional teams and how to create high-performing customer-focused organizations. Bill never stopped telling me the importance of managing the business versus processing the transactions. Bill left his mark on many organizations and people throughout his career.

If the book publishing industry gave awards for acts of everyday patience, one would surely go to Charlotte Ashcroft, our editor at Berrett-Koehler. She gets the credit for calmly responding to our occasional cries of “We have to do what?!?!?” as she walked us through the ins and outs of our responsibilities following delivery of what, in our eyes, was already a perfect manuscript.

Then there’s Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, Berrett-Koehler’s managing editor and one of Bob’s long-standing friends-he’s-never-met. Over many years he and Bob agreed they needed to do a book together. And over that same span of years he patiently (patience appears to be built into Berrett-Koehler’s business culture) explained that no, the concept Bob thought was so deeply important wouldn’t turn into a book that would, for example, sell.

And then, when Bob suggested this one, he agreed that this time, perhaps, it would.

Speaking of friends we’ve never met, there’s the Keep the Joint Running community. These are the fine folks who read Bob’s weekly e-letter and, in their online comments and email correspondence, have, over the past sixteen-plus years, helped refine and improve the idea that no, there really is no such thing as an IT project, an idea first introduced in KJR’s predecessor, InfoWorld’s “IS Survival Guide,” back in 2002 (https://issurvivor.com/2002/04/01/the-new-world-of-prototyping-first-appeared-in-infoworld/). Our thanks to one and all.