Leading Complex Projects

CHAPTER 12WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

We suspect that much – perhaps all – of what we have learned will be entirely obvious to excellent project leaders. However, given how small that population is there will likely be some important learnings for most readers. We will start this concluding section by discussing the key things that we can now prove quantitatively that were known only anecdotally before. There are also some important lessons from our interviews with successful project leaders to share. We hope all these lessons will be picked up by those who aspire to lead complex projects in the future. We will then draw the implications for the companies and agencies around the world that sponsor large complex projects. We complete this section by addressing a set of practical how-to questions that we believe senior corporate and business executives charged with selecting leaders for their complex projects will want answered.

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED

1. Selecting the right project leader is important to project outcomes. The analysis in Chapters 4 and 5 proves that characteristics other than just being a smart, well-trained, and experienced project manager are essential for complex project success. This point may seem entirely obvious to some, but it clearly has not been obvious to those charged with putting the right people into complex project leadership positions because they have not been making very good choices. Twelve large industrial companies nominated ...