IntroductionAuthor Todd C. Williams has accumulated years of exposure to the inner workings of corporate management and experience of its link to project management. In particular, his studies have uncovered six areas of typical shortcomings, or downright failure, in communications. From these, he has developed an understanding of the differences between the purpose of corporate management and the delivery intent of project management. He has chosen to call these shortcomings "Execution Gaps". These execution gaps are from the top down and are, therefore, the responsibilities of top management.
Five of these gaps are identified as Goal-Project Alignment, Executive Sponsorship, Change Management, Effective Governance, and Leadership, all of which fall under the over-arching Gap (failure of) Common Understanding.[1]
As we shall see, Todd has organized his book accordingly and while it is intensely detailed, complete with what needs to be done in each case, the advice is clearly focused for top and middle management consumption. That is not to say that project managers will not be interested on account of the subject matter being generally out of their purview. On the contrary, the project management community should be delighted to see well-known areas of conflict being identified and explained, and remedial action ardently recommended for resolution. This book is recommended as a highly valuable reference manual for all those seriously involved in all organizational levels of major project management undertakings. About the author[2] Todd C. Williams is an executive consultant with three decades of experience helping organizations connect strategy to successful projects. He has worked with startups and multi-billion dollar companies. He is a prolific writer sharing his wisdom and experience so that others can succeed. His first book was the highly acclaimed Rescue the Problem Project: A Complete Guided to Identifying, Preventing, and Recovering from Project Failure AMACON 2011). Further, he was a contributor to Gower Handbook of people in Project Management (2013) and Toyota: Saga of Success (2008) as well as being a technical editor for other books on project management.
1. Todd C. Williams, Filling Execution Gaps, published by Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin, USA/Germany, 2017, p. xxxix
2. Ibid, p. v
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