Making It Happen

I enjoyed reading this book. The author does a good job informing the reader about the topic at hand while doing it in an entertaining fashion. Considering the topic at hand (normally boring) I enjoyed his sense of humor, which gave me quite a few unexpected laughs and chuckles as I read thought it. For eg: "We all looked at each other. I, for one, found this question difficult because our product was intangible. I had another donut hole to hide my ignorance."

The author does a nice job of presenting the framework within a story, which applies the material rather than just throw theory leaving you to figure out how to apply it. That being said, the application (storyline) is still thin as you still need to apply the material to your situations (which is jut fine). One of the main points of the book is that you should work from main principles and apply them to your situation rather than use a cookies cutter approach to everything, which makes a lot of sense.

The main framework this book shares is to allow the user to understand what a project is (an execution plan within an assignment). It teaches you the main parts of an assignment: Genesis, Design (preliminary & detailed), Execution plan (i.e. project), Execution, Review (design, project management, & idea). When you take on an assignment:
- Identify the sponsor (who controls money)
- Build you objective statement (based on genesis), get your sponsor to sign it (and any update/change to it along the way)
- Build your team (fill the following hats: sponsor, project manager, user's rep, implementer, administrator, feasibility analyst)
- Build a preliminary design & get is signed by sponsor (& budget to do detailed design)
- Build detailed design that can be used to start executing & get sponsor signature
- Build an execution plan: layout all tasks & put into a dependency chart that captures the task, resources needed, who will do it, how long it will take, dependency in other tasks. Start from the end & work backwards to identify what needs to be done to complete the project & identify the inter-relation between the tasks. You will find your critical path by finding the longest stream of dependent events. You can then crash your project (cost, scope, time, quality) & know the impact immediately.
- Implement (the better job you do before, the easier & less costly implementation is)
- Review the design (did deliverable match design), project mgmt (kept sponsor & tea, & users informed, delivered in time, in budget, got objective statement & each step signed, etc), and the idea (on a top level: was the idea a good one).

In summary: this is a great book with great material that is fun to read. Definitely recommend it.

Best book to introduce Pull Planning… planning from the End to the Start. An engaging and easy read!!