Lessons learned:

-- "Don't just preside over large projects; proactively stay ahead of them," says Lester. Focus on four core principles: people, schedules, budgets and measurements. "If one of the four gets out of whack, you need to know beforehand," he says.

-- Get tough. If one milestone in a large project is missed, it can trigger a domino effect that can ultimately cripple the project. "Find out who missed the milestone and replace them," he says. "Call a fact a fact. Quit worrying about hurting people's feelings. I sound like a hard case, but there has to be pain felt in the corpus of the organization in these large projects."

-- Establish a performance-based relationship with your vendors. There is too much at stake in large projects to proceed based simply on trust.

Tom Shelman