What Is the Official Title of Your New Book?
Project Lessons from The Great Escape (Stalag Luft III) is the fourth book in the Lessons from History series. The book follows the evolution of an escape from a World War II Prisoner of War camp and lessons are applied to today's business and project environment. The book makes business recommendations that are backed up by its exhaustively detailed case study of a project team working to achieve a common goal.

Why Did You Choose The Great Escape?
After completing Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise I was looking for a simpler historical project that had a straightforward story line and a well defined beginning, middle, and end. It had to be an event that was run as project and relied heavily on human ingenuity and perseverance. When I first considered the idea of using the Great Escape I was concerned it was too far removed from what is generally considered "a project." Quite simply it was the least obvious project I could think of. At first glance most people would not even perceived it to be a project. Yet on further research and analysis this event went through meticulous and an enormous level planning. When the escape committee started to plan their escape they were instigating a project of a monumental scale. Nothing was easy, almost everything was a challenge. These were dire circumstances, an inhospitable and in conducive environment set up to numb prisoners into boredom and inactivity. Hence, the appeal as today's projects seem tame in comparison.

How Does the Book Relate to PMBOK?
One of the criteria of in writing the book was to examine the given project from the 9 project management knowledge areas of the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK), developed in 1983. Yet, how well founded are these? Is there evidence that projects of the past followed these intuitively, in the days before the project management discipline was established? I wanted to determine how well the project followed the 9 project management knowledge areas.

Can You Give Us a Short Synopsis
Stalag Luft III was set up to prevent escape. As POWs arrived in the camp they were given and had to suffer starvation rations, overcrowding, the extremes of a seasonal climate, and the constant threat of diseases. Worse still they were being incarcerated for an unknown length of time. The airmen were dragged to the lowest of depths so their spirits were broken.

The starting point for the project was in March of 1943 with the move to a new camp, the North Compound, created to relieve some of the overcrowding. From the outset the move to and taking up of brand-new quarters would cause confusion and provide new opportunities, and all sorts of possibilities for escape.

The arrival of Roger Bushell, arch escaper, codenamed ‘Big X' changed all of this. Bushell was very determined, ruthless, and believed that any escape had to be well organized. He introduced rigorous discipline and a governance framework were no one could escape without full authority. He set up the camp’s Escape Committee which was faced with the conundrum of determining the best possible approach to escape, and this varied depending on the available resources and the overall risks. By analyzing the resources and risks, they could determine the best Return on Investment (ROI). Bushell wanted to attempt something different were the investment was high but so was the payback. He set to work planning a mass escape on a scale never before attempted, freeing 200 prisoners in one go. He set up departments responsible for different aspects of escape, for example,  Intelligence Gathering, Tunnel Engineering, Equipment and Tool Making, Document Production, Map Making, as shown in the figure below.

The project planning and preparation were hindered everyday by new obstacles. The environment was ripe for a project failure. Yet the escape committee (project team) was able to organize itself and remove each obstacle it faced. Throughout the project, no written project plan was ever produced yet planning was done extensively. The escape committee overcame continuous difficulties and ran the project in an agile fashion.

With very limited resources somehow the POWs in Stalag Luft III organized this project of staggering proportions. They got around complex problems through ingenuity and working closely together in pooling their brains to find quite remarkable solutions.

The project went surprisingly well until implementation. Bushell was forced to name the night because the likelihood of discovery had risen dramatically. The escape was hampered by problems that had not been foreseen, for example, the exit trap door was frozen, an air raid forced power to be cut off to the tunnel for one hour (no lights), a tunnel cave in took an hour to fix. In addition, the project committee made up the early escapers including Bushell, so the leaders were not around to deal with some of the problems. The expected throughput of 60/hour was actually 12/hour and in the end 76 escapers made it out.

Most POWs were caught within 24 hours but the escape caused massive disruption with over a million men looking for the escapees. To set an example 50 POWs were executed. For those who were recaptured and executed, a memorial was erected in the woods near the prison camp. In a more recent development, The Great Escape Memorial Project, a charitable organization counting several POW survivors among its members, is currently seeking to build a museum on the site of the original prison camp. The publisher of Project Lessons from The Great Escape will donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of each book to support the efforts of this group.

What are the Principal Lessons for Business?
In today’s world business people are grappling with numerous obstacles in planning and executing projects in a climate of rapid changes. What can be learned from this event and put into practice today?

The Great Escape can be applied to projects today. Many projects today are initiated with clear objectives, executive sponsorship, and a healthy budget but, still fail. Other projects have no budgets, many obstacles in their way, and succeed. This is the story of one of the perceived successes. For example:

• the escape committee, under tremendous pressure, inspired the inmates around them to continue a fight considered lost,
• the camp PoWs were unified to work on this one project, maximizing the work effort, and matching their skill sets against project activities,
• the escape committee understood the problems facing them and focused slender resources on critical tasks.

Former prisoner of war (POW) and Great Escape participant George McKiel states that “The loyalty, tight security, creative solutions, and dearth of facilities that plagued POWs brought forth pragmatic but novel solutions to our project team.” In his foreword to the new book Project Lessons from The Great Escape (Stalag Luft III), McKiel notes how decentralized decision making and team building contributed to the escape project. He also cites the importance of building a high level of trust on the project team, especially when team members are literally putting their lives on the line for the success of the project.

What Made You Write This Book?
As I researched the subject it became very apparent that this was a project that was all about people, that is not just driven by people, but the levels of trust that existed between the project team were exceptional, something we do not see today.

Given the rise in the importance of project management principles over the past decade, there has been strong demand for books on project management theory. What has been missing somewhat are books that show the practical application of project management theory in real-world examples.

Who Should Read It?
The book is primarily targeted at people in the business world involved in projects, and also very much at project managers running these. If you are taking your PMP then this is an useful addition to the PMBOK.

What Makes It Different To Many PM Books Available On The Market?
Let’s be blunt here when was  the last time you read a book about IT or projects that held your attention for  more than 10 minutes.  The book weaves the two stories together to compare how Bushell set up his organization in a project to escape from an escape proof camp, and how project managers today need to be able to overcome challenges and change to set up, initiate, and deliver a complex project in today's organization.

Shall I Recommend It To My Customers?
Absolutely. If you are at the beginning or in the midst of a tough, challenging project, and are looking for inspiration to deliver it successfully. I always thought about how effective history was as an educational tool. Later in my career I realized that using historical analogies was a powerful and non-threatening way to get a point across.