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Project management techniques have met with widespread acceptance as a means of expediting product development, making efficient use of resources, and stimulating cross-functional communication. Not only manufacturing firms, but also legal offices, hospitals, and local governments have accepted project management as an indispensable part of their operations. Yet failures and outright disasters abound in the history of project management. A study of these failures indicates a dozen sure-fire methods for dooming a project: ignore its environment; push a new technology to market too quickly; don't bother to build in fallback options; when problems occur, shoot the person most visible; let new ideas starve to death from inertia; don't bother conducting feasibility studies; never, ever admit a project is a failure; micromanage the project managers and their teams; never, ever conduct post-failure audits; never try to understand project trade-offs; let politics dictate crucial project decisions; and make sure the project is run by a weak leader. However, past failure need not discourage us from future efforts. Indeed, it is through these past failures that we gain the savvy to push on to successful ventures.

The expanded use of project management techniques is not always met by a concomitant increase in the pool of competent project managers. Senior managers readily acknowledge the ad hoc manner in which most project managers acquire their skills, but are unsure how better to develop a supply of well-trained project leaders for the future. Over the last several years, we have conducted interviews with dozens of senior project managers asking the question: "What information were you never given as a novice product manager that, in retrospect, could have made your job easier?" From the responses, we offer some rules as a useful means of understanding the challenge project managers face and some ways to address these concerns: understand the unique context of project management; recognize project team conflict as progress; understand who the stakeholders are and what they want; accept and use the political nature of organizations; understand what "success" means, operationally; remember that enthusiasm and despair are both infectious; build and maintain a cohesive team; and use time carefully, or it will use you.