30-Minutes Recovery

Your project is in trouble. Working harder isn't going to fix it.

The deadline isn't moving. The scope has grown. The client thinks everything is fine. Your team is exhausted. And the original plan bears no resemblance to what's actually happening.

Most project management books are written for projects that are going well. This one is for the leader standing in the wreckage — the one who needs to figure out what to do before the end of the week.

This is not a turnaround methodology. It's not a crisis management philosophy. It's a practical guide to saving a failing project — without burning your team out or destroying the client relationship.

In under 120 pages, you'll learn:

• How to know for certain whether your project is behind (fixable) or in genuine trouble (needs recovery) — with a five-question diagnostic you can answer honestly in five minutes
• How to run a structured one-hour Recovery Assessment with your team that turns chaos into a clear picture: where you actually are, why you got there, what's still salvageable, and what your options are
• How to make the hard decisions — scope cuts, deadline extensions, the sunk cost trap — with a framework that makes them defensible to yourself, your team, and your client
• How to have the recovery conversation with the client: the exact structure, the specific words, and what not to say
• How to rebuild a realistic plan your team can actually execute — and why it must be simpler than the original
• How to lead a demoralised team through recovery without making the burnout worse
• How to manage the people around the project — partners, stakeholders, suppliers — before they find out from someone else
• What to do after the crisis ends: repairing the relationship, taking care of the team, and learning from it in a way that actually changes how you work

Plus five practical tools: the Recovery Assessment Framework, the One-Page Recovery Plan Template, the Client Recovery Conversation Script, the "Is My Project in Trouble?" Diagnostic, and the Recovery Retrospective Template.

Every chapter opens with a real-world failure story, delivers one core concept, and closes with specific steps you can take immediately. No jargon. No enterprise methodology. No lectures about what you should have done differently.