This 2001 Dorset House volume captures dialogue from the shape-forum, an online community Weinberg helped found and nurture. Co-edited with James Bullock and Marie Benesh, it collected threaded discussions on project management problems from practitioners who were working through real situations rather than presenting polished theory.
The SHAPE Forum format was distinctive: it was asynchronous dialogue among practitioners, preserving the back-and-forth of genuine problem-solving rather than smoothing it into authoritative pronouncements. Weinberg had long believed that wisdom about complex domains lived in dialogue, not in textbooks — the forum made that belief structural.
The project management territory covered here intersects with Weinberg's quality-software-management-framework but approaches it from the messy ground of practice. Questions of estimation, scope, stakeholder management, and team dysfunction appear in their actual complexity rather than as textbook cases.
Publishing forum dialogues as a book was an unusual choice for dorset-house-publishing, but it reflected a broader Weinberg interest in capturing how communities of practice actually think. The companion volume on technical leadership appeared the following year.