A Novel Approach

I've been asked many times by people who are new to project management just how to get started. I point them to various web sites or management books as introductory resources. The new managers visit these sites or read these books and quickly become lost in all the new terms and ideas. Eager to succeed, they plow forward with plans and charts and graphs, forgetting what is important about a project--completing the job. By the time these managers come up for air, their project is off track, their team is demoralized, and their customer is ready to leave. 

I began looking for a new way to approach project management, hoping to find a simpler way to explain this to new PMs, when I stumbled across a vast resource of information previously untapped. These resources touch the very heart of creativity, address inner motivations and help people overcome the most difficult of tasks. What resources? Why, the whole "how to write a novel" industry! 

As a frustrated writer, I often turn to various books titled such things as "How to Write a Novel in Under Five Weeks" for ideas on how to approach such a daunting task. These books hold the assumption that everyone can write a novel by simply following a set of steps. As I read these steps, I realized that they are treating a novel as though it were a project, with steps, deliverables and a goal. 

So how is …