Customer Reviews

Blueprint for Project Recovery--A Project Management Guide: The Complete Process for Getting Derailed Projects

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Is it possible to take a handful of meaningless paragraphs and recycle them over and over into a book length document? Absolutely! Ronald Cagle has proven this with his "Blueprint for Project Recovery--A Project Management Guide: The Complete Process for Getting Derailed Projects
". The book contains pitifully little useful information. Digging through the book for nuggets of wisdom was absolute torture.

While the book does offer a few checklists and references a handful of tools, the book is still basically useless. The checklists are incomplete and do not adequately represent the set of questions that need to be asked to understand the nature of a failed project or outline a path to its successful recovery. Though a handful of useful tools are referenced, they are not properly described or demonstrated. Further, there are blatant errors within the book starting with inaccurate definitions for terms like program and project. The book also wastes lots of paper repeatedly reciting common sense rules that any minimally competent professional would already know.

Despite the title, there is no defined methodology for taking a troubled project and placing it back on the road to recovery.

I had high hopes for this book but was grossly disappointed.

I was deciding whether to throw this book out, having bought it many years ago when I knew nothing about project management. My copy had been hiding at the back of the bookshelves, and had escaped previous waves of spring cleaning.

I decided to throw it out. I was skeptical initially of the other reviewer's comments. Had this author really got the definition of a project wrong? Yes. The author tries to do the right thing on page one of the book, by defining the term "project." After all, the book is about projects. The author writes "We'll start with the difference between a project and a programme. Everybody has his own definition, so here's mine. A project is conducted for a customer who is internal to an enterprise. A program is conducted for a customer who is external to an enterprise." At least two things are wrong with this. Only in a trivial sense is it the case that "Everybody has his own definition" of the term "project" and "programme." There are national standards that define these terms, and while many organizations no doubt do have their own unique definitions, it is simply careless and possibly misleading to say that "Everybody" does. The author is perfectly entitled to his own definition, but the one he chooses means he misses the opportunity to deal with some of the most critical aspects of failing projects and programmes. The internal / external distinction can be made, but more usually a programme is a set of projects, and while a single project aims to succeed and has a definite end point, a programme may not have a definite end point and the success of the individual project may not be critical to the programme.

The problem of definitions on page one of this book need not matter to the overall success of the book, but the book carries on unrealistically. For example, on p. 64, the author advocates that in the event of the customer not knowing what they want, you must clarify this--so far so good--but then "your enterprise policies should call for complete minutes of the negotiation ...:." Whoa! Maybe in some highly bureaucratic cultures every step of a negotiation should be minuted, but in most cases the requirement is to minute the outcome, the decision, what was agreed, and not every step on the way there. In some cases attempting to minute every step would actually hinder progress, perhaps fatally.

So, I agree with the other reviewer, this is a bad book. Don't buy it. And if you have a copy, throw it out, and hurl it with great force if you can. It is hard to feel that the contents are credible because the errors in definitions and because what is recommended goes against so much that actually works in practice. A pity, the book must have cost much in toil and sweat to write.

"EPICTETUS"