It Sounded Good When We Started: A Project Manager's Guide to Working with People on Projects

A commonsense guide to real-world project management

Common sense isn’t always commonly practiced. Anyone who has 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 is 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 title is a general troubleshooting guide for people who work on projects with other individuals. As such, its content will prove useful in many different settings and applies to many different kinds of endeavors. Most of the stories center around 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 of creating a better project environment, one where problems get solved more easily and happen less frequently.

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