Working Together: 12 Principles for Achieving Excellence in Managing Projects, Teams, and Organizations

Working Together reveals for the first time how visionary project manager Alan Mulally was able to mold Boeing's many disparate elements into a well-oiled team­­one that delivered the revolutionary Boeing 777 both on time and on budget. Built upon Mulally's twelve guiding principles of project management, it provides managers with clear, easy-to-understand guidance for spearheading virtually any type of project, in any organization.

Written by bestselling project management author James P. Lewis, Working Together takes into account both the human and technical sides of business as it tells organizational leaders how to develop:

• A clear, uncompromising mission, supported by nonconflicting performance goals
• Active, ongoing practices for transforming the culture of an organization
• Reward systems based on cooperation, not competition

  Successfully managing a project is one of today's most valuable and sought-after skills. Working Together outlines how any executive can plan, execute, and sustain remarkable project success, achieving desired results while virtually eliminating destructive intrateam conflict.

  The Boeing 777 development program is one of the past half-century's most stirring, successful examples of organizational teamwork, and Alan Mulally is one of the most celebrated and accomplished project managers. Based on the principles Boeing and Mulally followed on the 777 project, Working Together provides hands-on guidance for successfully managing projects, teams, and organizations, along with techniques and strategies executives and managers can implement to consistently achieve project excellence.

  "Working together," Boeing's guiding philosophy, is more than just a program-of-the-month or a catchy slogan. It represents an integrated set of twelve principles that a company can use to conduct itself, both internally with its employees as well as externally in relation to its customers, suppliers, and community. Each chapter in Working Together works as both a self-contained lesson in leadership and a crucial piece in the development of organizational success, describing:

  • Clear Performance Goals­­How to develop goals that go beyond purely financial measures to encompass value drivers including customer and employee satisfaction, innovation, and quality
  • One Plan­­Methods to construct a coordinated, integrated master plan that is effectively communicated by management­­with individual functional plans developed to coordinate with it
  • The Value of Data­­In-depth examination of the possibilities trapped inside data, and how solutions in a project are generally arrived at through facts rather than feelings

    In today's technologically complex, logistically challenging global environment, lone wolves generally do not survive long. Working Together outlines a unique, proven system for inspiring teamwork among factions and building a unified whole from distinct and self-contained pieces. For managers of enterprises ranging from 10 employees to 10,000, the answers it provides are direct, refreshing, and proven effective in some of today's most grueling, competitive project environments.

   

About the Author

James P. Lewis, Ph.D., is president of The Lewis Institute, Inc., a training and consulting company specializing in project management. Dr. Lewis has trained over 20,000 project managers since 1980 and continues to teach seminars for major corporations and universities throughout the U.S., England, and the Far East. He has written articles for professional publications including Training and Development Journal, Apparel Industry, and Transportation and Distribution, and has authored numerous books, including Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control, The Project Manager's Desk Reference, Fundamentals of Project Management, and others.