Virgin Island Project
The Comic Book - II. Edition

Dear edu-comic reader,

Over 10 years ago, the first edition of V.I.P. – Virgin Island Project was published. Over 10 years passed since then and the world still struggles with large projects. In Germany, large projects have a very bad reputation. A typical example would be the New Berlin Airport which suffered heavy delays and cost overruns.

What I also observe is poor preventive planning by the project managers. Risk management is still treated as a step child to project management. As a result, the project managers spend many hours in “self- created fire-fighting” situation. Instead of preventing issues from happening, issues are fixed in ad-hoc initiatives. In other words, there is still a great market for excellent project managers in this world for the next coming decades.

Not much seems to have changed in project manage- ment since the last 10 years. More of our work is done “Virtually” these days. We even use Agile project management techniques on some projects. Overall, the innovations in project management have been small. What has changed is that organizations have got leaner and therefore processes need to be simplified so that project teams can apply them in their projects. Functional managers and sponsors continue to be a big challenge. Their level of under- standing of project management too often is still poor. As a result, project managers spend a lot of energy in creating the right level of awareness for their projects.

In the second edition, we have worked on the edu- cational element of the edu-comic in the form of interviews and a visual project management overview at the end of the comic to increase the value of learning for you, the reader.

We wish you fun reading the edu-comic and hope that you learn enough to apply them on your projects such that you manage them professionally and proactively. You, the project manager, are the most important person on a project. Projects succeed or fail, depending on your skills and your backbone. We wish you: May the force be with you!

Dieburg, February 2020

Dr. Ralf Friedrich,  Michael Kunz