Why human skills and expertise, not technical tools, are what make projects succeed.

The project is the basic unit of work in many industries. Software applications, antiviral vaccines, launch-ready spacecraft: all were produced by a team and managed as a project. Project management emphasizes control, processes, and tools—but, according to The Smart Mission, that is not the right way to run a project. Human skills and expertise, not technical tools, are what make projects successful. Projects run on knowledge. This paradigm-shifting book—by three project management experts, all of whom have decades of experience at NASA and elsewhere—challenges the conventional wisdom on project management, focusing on the human dimension: learning, collaboration, teaming, communication, and culture.

The authors emphasize three themes:

• projects are fundamentally about how teams work and learn together to get things done
• the local level—not an organization’s upper levels—is where the action happens
• projects don’t operate in a vacuum but exist within organizations that are responsible to stakeholders

Drawing on examples and case studies from NASA and other organizations, the authors identify three project models—micro, macro, and global—and their different knowledge needs. Successful organizations have a knowledge-based culture. Successful project management guides the interplay of knowledge, projects, and people.

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.