What Made Gertie Gallop?: Lessons from Project Failures

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

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.