When I posted my first blog post, I was simply trying to capture a small set of thoughts while at the same time take my name (Gregory Scott Wall) back on the internet.
- I was putting ideas on paper before they disappeared.
- I wasn’t building a framework.
- I wasn’t planning a series.
- I wasn’t thinking about writing a book.
Over the last year, those individual thoughts became more than a dozen blog series made up of one to many articles each. Then after dozens of blog posts it became obvious that I was going to reach the hundreds, meaning I needed a logical order to capture them. Hence, my blog series groups were born as follows.
- Automotive, Off-road, & Motorcycles
- Business & Work
- Coasters & Parks
- English & Language
- Financial & Credit
- Games & Gaming
- Habits & Routines
- Legal, Government, & Social Systems
- Music & Entertainment
- Personal
- Philanthropy
- Project Leadership Unlocked
- Retail Revealed
- School, Education, & Training
- Science, Earth, & Space
- Security, Compliance, & Safety
- Shopping & Products
- Sports & Events
- Technology & Software
- Tools & Workshop
- Travel & Locations
What I have come to realize is that I may have accidentally been writing chapters from a book all along. Or perhaps several books with over 100 blogs still in the works.
The Beauty of Writing Before I Know the Destination
One of the recurring themes in project leadership is that clarity often emerges through action. We rarely have a perfect set of requirements or discoveries at the beginning. We move forward, learn, adjust, change, and eventually discover that the path itself was creating the product.
Writing has been much the same for me. Articles such as the following have come from putting my virtual pen to paper.
- PMP Bootcamp Experiences
- How Project Management Changed the Way I Think
- What Do Project Leaders Do? We Communicate and Translate…
- Project Leadership: Navigating the Storm
These were never intended to be chapters in a larger work as they were snapshots of my thoughts at the time.
My Blogs Were Observations
Lessons learned from projects, teams, successes, mistakes, and conversations accumulated across decades of experience. Each blog that I have written was to stand on its own to convey a thought or two that I could not get out of my head. Yet when I look back across the collection, I can see connections that were invisible when the articles were first published.
- The topics have build upon one another
- The ideas repeat and strengthen
- Patterns emerge
- A narrative begins to form
Project Management, My Career
The first book project will likely carry a familiar title: “Project Leadership Unlocked”
Many of my blog readers will recognize that name from the growing collection of articles sharing the same theme.
Topics such as:
- Starting with the end in mind
- Risk management
- Resource assignments
- Resource availability
- Accurate estimations
- Testing and quality
- Time reporting
- Stakeholder engagement
- Change management
- Lessons learned
- Communication and translation
These are not isolated subjects anymore. They are interconnected responsibilities that project leaders face every and every day. Individually, these posts make for thoughtful blog over the days. That said, collectively, they have become a comprehensive discussion about what project leadership actually looks like in practice.
The book will not simply be a collection of blog posts pasted together. Instead, the articles will serve as source material. They are the raw ingredients that can be expanded, refined, connected, and organized into a logical flow that helps readers build understanding from chapter to chapter… heck, I may even add some graphics or design elements.
Yes, I get it, the blogs supply the thoughts and a future book will be cumulation of those into a formal structure.
The Challenge of Organizing What Was Never Meant to Be Organized
There is an irony here as many project leaders spend their careers bringing order to complexity. Now I find myself doing exactly that with my own writing. My blog posts were never written sequentially, just stream of thought. They are written when inspiration strikes, as one week I may be thinking about risk management and the next week I may be reflecting on retrospectives. A month later I might suddenly write about stakeholder discovery or testing strategies.
The result of my chaos is a collection of ideas that resembles a box of puzzle pieces more than a finished picture at this time. The challenge for me now is determining how those pieces fit together, luckily I have twenty plus years of experience working in this realm to help me get there.
- Which topics belong at the beginning?
- Which ideas naturally lead to others?
- Which stories belong together?
The work feels surprisingly similar to building a project plan from a collection of requirements and stakeholder inputs. The content exists and then the task is creating the roadmap for implementation.
Blogs as a Living Knowledge Base
One advantage of approaching a book in this way is that the content remains alive. Traditional books often represent a fixed point in time and my blogs continue evolving, often much further than I could ever have imagined.
- New experiences generate new lessons.
- New projects expose new challenges.
- New technologies introduce new opportunities and risks.
The future chapters of Project Leadership Unlocked are likely to be written today, tomorrow, and next week, even if you have not seen them yet… They exist in my brain, as rough notes, or frameworks for the actual blog. Others may emerge from future conversations, projects, successes, and failures. The book will benefit not only from what has already been written but also from what has yet to be documented.
More Than One Book
As I review my growing catalog of articles, another realization becomes apparent. There may not be just one book hidden within these posts, there may be several. Project leadership is certainly one theme, but it is not the only one.
There are articles about career development, about obtaining certifications, and about personal growth. I have written posts about leadership, communication, critical thinking, organizational change, and technology transformation.
What began as a blog has become a library of ideas and concepts. The challenge is no longer finding something to write about; it is deciding which story to tell first.
The Journey Continues
At this moment, there is no publication date and no finalized manuscript. There is no complete table of contents, only a growing collection of experiences, lessons, observations, and ideas gathered across hundreds of articles.
What I do know is that these blogs represent far more than isolated posts. They capture a journey of learning, leadership, and continuous improvement. The next step is transforming that collection into something larger.
A book, or perhaps a series of books.
While I do not yet know exactly what the final product will look like, I know where it will come from. It will come from the words that have already been written as the seed and water, I just need to fertilize that in the coming weeks and months. The result will be a culmination of the lessons that have already been learned and the many blog posts that are still waiting to be written.