Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Project Imperatives: Do or Die
Doug is the author of the landmark book, Extreme Project Management®: Using Leadership, Principles and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility. He works with clients who undertake projects in very demanding environments: those settings that feature high speed, high change, high unpredictability and high stress. Doug has lived in the trenches—from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to Beijing, China—with over 275 project teams with budgets that ranged from $25,000 to over $25 million. He is one of the founders of the Agile Leadership Network, an organization dedicated to connecting, developing and supporting great project leaders. He is known for his hard-hitting and humorous keynote speeches that address vital issues facing today’s project-based organizations. You can visit Doug at www.dougdecarlo.com.
Pick a project that you are now working on…any one. Ask yourself, “What are the handful of things that must go right for this project to succeed, and if they don’t the project will be considered a failure?”
Everyone on the project team should be able to rattle off the project’s imperatives as quickly as if you asked them their name, address and telephone number. Yet, when you bring up the question to project managers and team members, you typically witness a vacant stare followed by a lot of mental scrambling and verbal fumbling.
A reality with just about any project is that there are hundreds of things that come at you, yet there is simply not enough time to deal with everything. You have to duck some things. A major benefit of knowing your project imperatives cold is to use them as a filter to focus your attention. That is, anything that has a direct impact on the success or failure of the project is a priority. Obviously, bug without knowing one’s imperatives, it’s easy to get diluted.
Project imperatives reflect three of the 10 Shared Values of eXtreme Project Management, namely Clarity of Purpose, Results Orientation and Visibility. By Visibility, I mean those key things that everyone needs to continually keep in front of them and focus on throughout the venture.
In hindsight, take the Katrina…
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"Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers." - Voltaire |