Customer Reviews

What Made Gertie Gallop?: Lessons from Project Failures

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The reasons why i bought this book were primarily to read about the experiences with past projects and also because i was curious to find out about the kind of problems that some of these well known projects had to deal with.

This book gives inside looks into some former major international projects. Although long ago and of a size that most of us projectleaders nowadays will not be engaged in frequently, they still hold important elements of project planning that should be considered now and in the future. Too often these days the wheel is being reinvented, whereas simple checklists based on these past project experiences could serve as eye-openers because of the `deja-vu' effect that relates to these projects.

The book showed me that looking at the stated examples of experienced projectleaders the authors no doubt are there is nothing much new under the sun as far as contemporary projects are concerned: many problems that projectleaders encounter these days are very similar to those in the past and should be considered.

Another book i read in this context was Steve McConnell's Software Project Survival Guide.

The projects reviewed here are old enough that they have been analyzed well enough for fairly complete understanding to be possible. The mega-scale of the projects makes them less than directly applicable for most readers, but their large scale makes for a completeness in their management, smaller projects frequently skimp on their formal management and are usually less well documented, that makes for a better analysis.

The techniques are well illustrated by the projects chosen and the writing does not get in the way of the analyses. This book is very clearly written, the individual project analyses can almost be read like short stories, but with the added benefit of being factual.

For those more interested more in a popular treatment of engineering failure than project management failure I recommend Henry Petroski's "To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design". I mention this because when I bought this I thought this book was more on engineering failure than it was; a lucky mistake since it turned out to be more interesting and useful than I expected.

Added Later: When I started bloging I included this review as part of a more general essay on Getting Things Right by Avoiding Mistakes.

http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/03/getting-things-right-by-avoiding.html

After reading the author's previous work (Successful Project Managers), I couldn't wait to get my hands on this sequel. I was quickly disappointed in this book. The words of wisdom imparted could have been distilled down into a small paperback book. The examples cited were large scale "mega" projects that while interesting to read made for little relevance in my own work. There seemed to be a preoccupation with 3rd world projects that sounded more like the evils of "big business" picking on small 3rd world governments. The authors, with this book, failed to bring relevant 1997 business problems to the forefront for discussion. My recommendation is to borrow this book from someone and spend your money on their previous work (Successful Project Managers)

The big news last week was that a government study group released details about the next leap forward for the Internet, including transmission speeds up to 100 faster than the current 56k standard. Already, people are muttering that it isn't fair that these benefits will be rolled out first to universities and government facilities. Hey, people. I have been corresponding for the past month with a gentleman from Bombay who would commit high crimes to have 56k, and optic fiber leading to his home. His name is O.P. Kharbanda, and he is, like me, a business writer, having authored some 30 books on project management, disaster response, and other topics, including What Made Gertie Gallop? Lessons from Project Failures, co-authored with Jeffrey Pinto. In fact, I would paste the label of management guru on him, except that the word guru seems suddenly very provincial. But at 74, he is of an age to have accumulated some wisdom. He signs his email Om - because that is his name. Dr. Kharbanda's complaint - I almost said beef - is that he can't be a full player in the online revolution because the infrastructure where he is won't let him. "My system is admittedly not the latest," he writes. "I have a 486 PC with 16 megabytes of RAM, a 200-megabyte hard disk, CD-ROM, and 2400 baud modem. I run DOS, though I can run Windows 3.1 as well. I connect to the Internet via pine (email) and lynx (a text-based browser)." So when I invited Dr. Kharbanda to visit my web site, he really couldn't. Lynx is a poor way to grapple with the multimedia offerings of the Web. And the phone connections he relies on in Calcutta are poor. Many disconnects, lots of line noise, not nearly enough fiber optic. It's not a tin can on a string, but it's not a T1 line, either. Though the middle class in India is discovering and delighting in the Internet, the experience is substandard. Only four metro areas (Calcutta, Chenai, Mumbai and New Delhi) have Internet service that he is aware of, and only a few thousand customers are enrolled so far. Without proper phone lines and without a graphic browser, you can't see someone else's Web page, much less put up one of your own. Because communications are crummy, Dr. Kharbanda has been unable to police his work the way authors in the U.S. do. When he finally was able to contact Amazon.com, for instance, they had no clue who he was, despite having about 20 of his books on their list. Even his publishers, owing to the departure of editors and the acquisition of whole houses, weren't quite sure who he was. Anyway, I have decided to put Dr. Kharbanda's writing back on the map. Starting today, he has a Web site, backboned onto mine, at http://www.skypoint.com/~mfinley/kharbanda.htm. I'm going to see if I can teach him how to send me a photo of himself. If you're into project management, give it a look. Dr. Kharbanda is a hero to me, for being eager to learn and undertake big new projects at a goodly age, despite the disadvantages of bad technology. The rest of you, complaining about 56k being only 53k - shaddup! by Michael Finley Copyright © 1998 by Michael Finley Co-author of Transcompetition: Moving beyond Competition and Collaboration.