Bennatan uses his hands-on management experience with software development projects to provide a step-by-step approach to recovering, or disentangling from, a failing project. The first two chapters provide an overview of the process of rescuing, or disentangling from, a failing project. Three metrics are introduced to determine if a project should be rescued or abandoned: schedule, budget, and software quality.

In the next ten chapters, the author provides the steps to disentangle from a failing project. The first step is to stop the project—not permanently, but just long enough to examine the project in detail.

The second step is to assign an evaluator. Here, a disinterested party or team is assigned to perform an honest and unbiased appraisal of the project, and to determine what is going wrong, and what can be done about it.

In the third step, the evaluator takes the lead in performing a complete review of the project. The result of this step is to find out what is being done right and what is going wrong. Step four is to examine the people working on the project, and determine if each and every team member is suited to his or her job, and if all are performing at the appropriate level.

The next step is to define minimum goals. Here, the evaluator determines the minimum level of achievement that will be considered a success. For large projects, goals should be trimmed down to a minimum set of achievable ones.

In step six, the team must ask: “Can minimum goals be achieved?” If the minimal level of success is not possible, then the decision must be made to terminate the project. The midway report to upper management should be done at this step.

The next step is to rebuild the team. Here, there are two basic components: personnel changes if necessary, and reinvigorating those who are going to remain part of the team. One of the greatest tasks is to overcome opposition, and to instill the team with renewed energy to achieve the new goals.

Risk analysis must be conducted in step eight. Here, the team has to identify all possible risks, and assign a reasonable probability of occurrence to each major one. Mitigation of the major risks should be implemented in this step.

In step nine, the plan is revised further. The author stresses the importance of software project planning, and provides guidelines for producing a disentangled project plan.

The final step is to create an early warning system by requiring that the various elements be installed to flag the appearance of problems when they are not yet serious. The project alarm triggers will allow the project manager to step in to make the necessary corrections.

In the epilogue, the author pulls together the final project reviews and the final report in a case study to show how they work together.

There is a summary at the end of each chapter, and there are exercises for readers to reinforce the concepts of each step. A separate list of references for each chapter is given at the end of the book, along with a glossary and a good index. This is a good reference book for practitioners in information technology (IT).