It Sounded Good When We Started

A common-sense guide to real-world project management

Common sense isn't always commonly practiced. Anyone who's ever worked on a project in a technical setting knows this. Indeed, much of working with others consists of solving unexpected problems and learning from mistakes along the way.

It Sounded Good When We Started: A Project Manager's Guide to Working with People on Projects provides essential reading for project managers trying to understand the trials and triumphs that can arise in any project setting. The authors, both respected project managers with sixty years of experience between them, describe their own mistakes as well as the many valuable lessons they drew from them. Instead of trying to formulate these in abstract theory, Phillips and O’Bryan tell the stories surrounding a particular project, providing a more memorable, real-world, and practical set of examples.

Written in a distinctly nontechnical style, this is a general troubleshooting guide for people who work on projects together. As such, its content proves useful in many different settings and applies to many different kinds of endeavors. Most of the stories are about problems—since it's the problems we often remember more than the successes—and what was learned from them. After describing a given problem, the authors analyze the issues that led to it and work towards various ways they've discovered to create a better project environment, one where problems get solved easier and happen less frequently.

It Sounded Good When We Started offers a highly readable go-to for engineers, scientists, computer professionals, and anyone working on specialized, collaborative projects.

DWAYNE PHILLIPS, PhD, has worked as a systems and computer engineer for the U.S. government since 1980. He performed liaison work with foreign governments, developed and maintained software, and for most of the past twelve years has managed projects. He is the author of The Software Project Manager's Handbook: Principles that Work at Work, also from Wiley.

ROY O'BRYAN has over forty-two years on the leading edge of technology, developing software and hardware systems. A former Senior Executive Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, O'Bryan has worked for the past thirteen years for Northrop Grummon as a Senior Staff Engineer providing technical and management assistance to a number of government programs.