All Change!

Infotech Solution's project leader is angry, Really angry. So angry he has resigned. Why? Because he had to implement a major initiative and had failed. He had to change an entire organization's culture when they did not even understand what a culture was. They were just 'too busy' to re-think the way they were operating.

Now he's in France on a holiday of indeterminate length. He's got time to ponder over what went wrong, how it could have been approached. But it is the mysterious Franck who has the real answers…

The Project Leader's Secret Handbook is written from your point of view. It accepts that your life is already busy without you having to follow long check-lists and do even more work. It pulls out the core which yields big results. Results out of proportion to your efforts…

The book that's a novel and a step-by-step guide all in one.

• All Change!
1. Full circle
2. My old mate
3. Holding on to your gains
4. A panacea which can make you ill
5. Bubble No 1: Learning to learn
6. Bubble No 2: Recognising stakeholders
7. So similar… Yet so different
8. Bubble No 3: Gaining Perspective
9. Bubble No 4: People and me
10. Down the creek without a paddle
• Epilogue: Out of the Circle
• The Project Leader's Secret Handbook
• Part 1: Diagnosing Your Own Project or Chunk of Change
1. Is it worth doing?
2. What type of change is it?
3. What sort of problems should you expect?
4. Which bubbles (skills/tools) should you focus on?
• Part 2: Try These
1. Learning to learn
1. Blowing bubbles
2. Managing review
2. Recognising stakeholders
1. Mapping stakeholders
2. Establishing the hard and soft criteria of success
3. The money
4. Balancing stakeholder expectations
3. Planning and co-ordinating
1. Sticky steps
2. Pacing yourself
3. The risk of being so near… yet so far: Co-ordination, control and risk
4. Communication strategies
4. Working with and leading people
1. Leadership? What leadership?
2. Lead the followers
3. Matching the person to the chunk
4. A last word
• Part 3: All Those New Words
1. The explanations

This is in reality two books! The novella describes an idiot to Project/Programme Manager that I probably would fire for being unable to grasp basic concepts that any PM course addresses (and of course his "mysterious" mentor, who is even worse than the idiots described in The Goal, etc.)

The more formulaic second half, that are supposed to build on the first part, feels like a poor-mans guide, and lacks most important concepts in Project/Programme as well as being totally incoherent on how to implement them.

A book to be avoided, as I regret the time I spent reading it!