Lessons from History Series Description

Written for organizations applying today's emerging technologies to common business problems. The series uses relevant historical case studies to examine how great historical projects and emerging technologies of the past solved complex problems. It then draws comparisons to challenges encountered in today’s projects, and project failures. It even looks at visions of the future taken from the past.

"A quarter of the benefits of IT projects are being lost by organizations across the globe because of management failures during a project’s lifecycle..."
Source: KPMG International survey, Nov 2005

Can Business Learn from History?

For thousands of years people have been planning and running projects that have leveraged emerging technologies of the time, to create unique and wonderful outcomes, structures like the pyramids, buildings, or bridges, or engineering projects to build various machines. 

Similarly, people have gone on great expeditions and journeys, and raced their rivals in striving to be first. For example, circumnavigating the world or conquering the poles. These were all forms of projects that required initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing.

If we think of today's Information Technology as the emerging technology of our time then there are many lessons for businesses today to take from these historical projects.

Important Lessons within Historical Projects

Historical projects can contain important lessons that are very relevant to projects today. For example, the sinking of Titanic may seem like an operational disaster but the construction project had a significant impact. The disaster was caused by compromises made during the project design, construction, and testing phases to accommodate various business interests; these compromises reduced the effectiveness of safety systems (functional versus non-functional rrequirements) and provided faulty operational data upon which to base management decisions. While no one could predict that the ship was going to strike ice, the compromises made during the build and launch of the ship almost guaranteed that such a collision was going to be a serious one and result in a catastrophic project failure. Using a historical example illustrates the consequences of seemingly innocuous operational decisions, helping executives avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Lessons from History Series Philosophy

The series vividly describes the crucial lessons from historical projects and compares these to today's best practices. It makes the whole learning experience more memorable. The series should inspire the reader as these historical projects were achieved with a lesser (inferior) technology. For example, some projects are truly from hell that no one wants to pick up and lead. Yet leaders emerge that not only lead the project but deliver something extraordinary, beyond all reasonable expectations. This happened in May 1940 when Winston Churchill stepped in under tremendous pressure, and took over such a project. Following the disaster at Dunkirk he inspired his nation to continue a fight already considered lost. Not only did he have to stave off an imminent enemy invasion but he had to move the peacetime economy to one that could support a war. He did all this in a project timeline of 5 months. The series examines this as a project, and in what he did, and how he did it as a project manager.