The bestiary
Mistakes have names. And headstones.
Half of the book’s vision comes through its villains. Each one embodies a recognisable mistake.
01 · Evan Stone
The toxic genius
Imposes the idea, blames the team, sees the PM as useless and the client as lucky to have him.
02 · Rolf, the PM Butcher
The polite executioner
Sabotages quietly, collects weaknesses and uses feedback as a weapon. Unable to work in a team.
03 · Sondra, “Our Lady of Accounts”
The bottleneck
Every email to the client must go through her. “An unbearable bottleneck. And a pointless one.”
04 · The four cousins
The factions
Three parallel projects, no shared vision, no estimates. They sabotage themselves.
05 · Jack the photographer
The technical optimist
“Minimum spend, maximum return”, until the bill for bandwidth, storage and security arrives.
06 · Alice and Lucy
The detail aesthetes
Days spent debating shades of white, while ordering the same marquee twice.
07 · Bob
The reckless wish
Acts on everyone’s behalf without asking anyone. The consequences come later.
08 · Dave
The tool without rules
Uses platforms with no filters or controls, because “the mainstream ones” aren’t enough.
09 · The Furry Yummy team
Slide-deck ethics
Social responsibility in every presentation, “all rhetoric”: awards are what count.
10 · Chad
The hidden agenda
The internal stakeholder working for himself, behind the project’s back.
11 · Father Frascuelo and the castes
Method as dogma
The methodology becomes identity, then tribal loyalty, then an instrument of power.
12 · Cesare
The arrogant stakeholder
Shouts his way out of every awkward situation. Yet, surprisingly, he turns out to be an ally.
13 · Alice and Sergio
The shortcut
Under pressure, they copy another agency’s work and present it as their own.
14 · Tina, the receptionist
The one who never takes notes
Forgets, delivers late, apologises. And never writes anything down.
The PM Butcher’s headstones
The epitaphs.
The serial killer of Project Managers buries his victims under a diamond-shaped stone, “the classic symbol of the Milestone”, engraved with a line (p. 64). Each line is a lesson in reverse. (English renderings of the Italian rhymes.)
- “Every ignored requirement is a project gone”
- “Get the strategy wrong and the agony goes long”
- “The art of turning a solution into a problem”
- “Analysis: failed”
- “Marketing: failed”
- “Killed By Bugs”