| Authors | published | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Clarke Ching | 2015 | Find the book here |
Rolling Rocks Downhill is a Business Novel taking place in a software development company, not unlike "The Goal" of Eliyahu Goldratt.
In the book we learn about a software development manager who is using his well-known management style with his teams, a bit higher but not too high up the management hierarchy. He is doing what he has learned to be ok and although projects never go smooth he is doing more or less well given that everyone around him seems to tolerate the negative consequences.
Unfortunately for him things heat up as a competitor comes in and hires off one of their project analysts. The competitor threatens the success of the project heavily and suddenly it plunges into a state where a lot of jobs, including those of managers higher up the chain are in jeopardy. Up to the existence of the company.
One of his bosses arranges a meeting with a TQM-guy. The manager first declines the help. The analogiesthe TQM-guy wants to sell seem to far fetched. Some time after his first meeting finally has nothing to loose anymore. Fortunately, the things the TQM-guy has to say start making sense and one by one a lot of different decisions are made (and explained) by the manager and his staff.
The rest of the book is about the different situations the project gets stuck in and how the methods of constraint management help to manage each situation, using cleaner solutions and even some, I'd say, not so clean tricks, until finally the project is delivered and finally in production, going live under the eyes of some very important people.
That saves everyones jobs - for then - but another problem is already waiting.