Pacelli, L., The Project Management Advisor. 18 Major Project Screw Ups, and How to Cut Them Off at the Pass, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River NJ, USA, 2004

I bought this book off the web and I couldn't "look inside" so I didn't really know what I was getting. I was surprised to see it was a fairly small book in terms of pages. But the size belies its value I suspect.

Lonnie Pacelli has put together a tight little package of wisdom, based it would seem on many of his experiences at Accenture and later Microsoft Corporation. He has 18 "screw ups" to share. A few are:

• We designed the wrong thing. In my experience, this comes from not being close to the user/customer of the system you are building.
• We didn't design a good project schedule. He has a couple of good pointers here. I liked particularly his questions around the schedule: 1) What is the deliverable that will be produced out of this activity? 2) What will it look like? 3) What happens if we don't do it? His philosophy is that if you can't get good answers for these questions seriously consider whether the task is worth doing.
• We tried to do too much. This is all about not focussing on what has to be delivered and permitting additional work or objectives or requirements to creep in.
• We didn't do enough testing. Pacelli brings out many valid issues here. The customer wasn't involved, the developers "assumed" it would work and so on.

I really think what Pacelli has done here is very useful and a very positive contribution to the practitioner side of project management even if he is bringing out more about "what not to do" rather than "what to do". But this "negative" theme works for me in this case.