Outline for a Book - anybody think this looks interesting? Late And Over-budget, a Real-World Survival Guide for Project Managers

The Difference Between Dreams and Reality - Life is Wiggly

• “I have a plan” - “So what?”
• Planning changes nothing
• If you don’t have a plan for changing your plan, you don’t have a plan

• Do the “Chicken Soup Exercise”
• What is the difference between things you thought about doing and things you actually did?
• I know I really had the Chicken soup because I spilt it on my shirt
• A plan is thinking about about having Chicken soup, it isn’t actually having Chicken soup
• Actually having Chicken soup is a messy business
• Thought goes in straight lines, real life is “wiggly”

Consistency - the Hobgoblin of Little Minds

• Doing what you say you’re going to do is a powerful human urge
• If you don’t do what you say you’re going to do, people will think that you’re either mad or evil.
• Getting other people to “keep their word” is a powerful way of controlling them.
• People attach huge value to delivering on a plan - even more value than delivering something valuable!

We are after all NOT Professionals

• The Cynefin Framework
• Simple - Journeymen (but does this kind of work really exist?)
• Complicated - Craftsmen, Professionals
• Complex - Consultants
• Chaotic - Artists, Researchers, Philosophers
• To be Good at your Job, you must realise that you are not good at your job
• Bullies, psychopaths and other senior management will try to trick you into thinking you should be good at your job, it makes you easier to manipulate
  
• What you CAN do, Reporting, Sorting, Counting and enabling the 3Ts (Talking, Thinking, Typing) a set of rules you CAN commit to
• A clean, well-lighted place
• This really isn’t rocket science
• Stop trying

A Beautiful Mind and the Buckaroo Project (Junking your project for fun and profit, misery and loss)

• Projects tend to get given work until they start to break
• Projects tend to have their resources stretched temporally and geographically until they start to break
• Most development teams start off broken, if you get them working, someone will break them
• Table 2’s Butter Bean - if you prod it and play with it, it will die
• This is probably something to do with John Nash and equilibria

The Power of Negative Thinking

• Everyone (i.e. idiots) hate short-sellers
  
• What project management is not
• No military metaphors please
• Fuck ""trying hard", I mean, seriously, that's your "strategy."
  
• Delivering value and discovering value vs delivering on a plan
• Level 0 people management
• The art of the possible
• People in glass houses shouldn’t order custom-built windows
• Noticing things
• Letting your petri dish go mouldy
• Playing with the goo on the pressure chamber floor
• Do you know funny thing about this angina drug?

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