During the execution of a project, the project manager has to do whatever it takes to complete a task without damaging his integrity and breaking the laws. As the driver of the project, the project manager has to promote creative solutions for stalled tasks, for antiquated company procedures, and for international deadlocks. A winning project team always has a determined quarterback who comes up with unusual plays and does whatever it takes to win the game.

A good example of determination to complete a task was experienced in a passenger-car body design in Europe. When the car body was being designed, NASA Structural Analysis (NASTR AN) was the only FEM design tool around. This tool was too expensive, and there was not enough computer memory to run the model at the design center or in the city that the design center was located. Time to market was of essence, and the car body specification had a low-weight target. The stress analysis engineer wrote the finite element model program, modeled the car body, and traveled four hundred miles to another city to run the calculations at nights at the computer of another organization. The results were brought back to the design center. The prototype body was built and design iterations were done by repeating the calculations and going back and forth to the city where the large-memory computer resided. The team did whatever it took to finish the car body design in one year. This example occurred in...