Project Rescue: Avoiding a Project Management Disaster

Congratulations Sanjiv and Joseph! If there are projects that are "recipes for disaster", this book is the "recipe for rescue". It's one of the best I've read in terms of the information contained and usefulness. It lays the information out in a logical way and strikes a perfect balance between theory and practice. Don't read this book and relegate it to the shelf: keep it on your desk to refer to when you encounter difficulties in your projects. In fact, I'd recommend it before tackling your next project. Just follow the steps in the book you'll avoid having your project go off the rails in the first place.

Sanjiv Purba et al do a fabulous job of writing a very practical and handy book that serves as an aid to Project Managers. The book outlines a four phase rescue framework that can be used for projects in trouble and as a best practices for projects in progress. The authors layout the four phase framework as 1) Assessment 2) Intervention Planning 3) Intervention Execution and 4) Post Intervention Review. The book comes with a bunch of questions that one can keep on asking to arrive at the problem source. The authors say "Asking questions of different members of the team is also a nonthreatening technique for posing difficult sceanrios. Instead of telling professionals to do a job that they may already be doing, a series of questions can be asked that does not make them feel like they are being accussed of messing up. It also allows them to suggest corrective courses of action" They go on to list down the questions and they are non-toxic questions. Now the downsides: * The book claims to have online forms at their publisher site, what would have been appropriate is if the authors would have gone a step ahead to create an accompanying site for the downloadable stuff. * I would have preferred to have one or two pages containing all the checklists that could be torn and carried out. Apart from the above, I think the book is a good buy at 500 bucks for an Indian Reprint! I paid $43 for my copy and am sure that it delivers value for every buck that I spent!