PREFACE
Witnessing teams develop new products, we have often been astonished to see “surprises” (that is, problems) pop up late in the project—which in fact should have come as no surprise at all. Indeed, in some cases, the very same problems had arisen before in other projects. In others, someone involved with the project suspected early on that a problem might occur, but no action was taken. (And such suspicions often remain entirely unspoken.) The developers fully intended to address a potential problem, but either a lack of time or a focus on other priorities prevented that from happening, and so that problem did not rise to a critical level of importance until it was too late.
Over the past decade, project management has become more ...
