Shared Voyage

This book is about four remarkable projects, two from NASA and two from the U.S. Air Force, and each is presented as a case study comprised of stories collected from key members of the project teams. We chose this format for Shared Voyage because people, to put it simply, love to read stories. Stories attract and captivate, plus they are memorable. The fact that most people are attracted to stories is crucial, especially in situations where the prospective learner suffers from a lack of time-which is the case for most project managers. More important, stories are very useful for sharing and disseminating organizational knowledge. Story-based management books are not a new phenomenon. In Search of Excellence is probably the best known story-based book on general management, while The Soul of a New Machine is probably the best story book ever written on managing a project. Our book, Shared Voyage, is meant primarily to serve as a self-learning handbook and reference guide for experienced, as well as less experienced practitioners. It should be useful for the entire project community: project managers, team members, managers to whom project managers report, and project customers and users. The story format makes it user-friendly for all those project managers and team members working in industry, business, and government, in the United States and throughout the world. Students, researchers, and scholars of project management and public administration should find it useful as well.