FOR PROJECT MANAGERS WHO'VE BEEN BURNED BEFORE
Every Project Has a 17th at Sawgrass. Most PMs Find Out the Hard Way.
You don't beat a signature hole by hoping. You beat it because someone before you walked it, measured it, and wrote down exactly where it goes wrong. This is that book — for your next project.
You've Stood Over This Shot Before
You didn't get a bad kickoff meeting. You got a scope that shifted the moment the stakeholders actually saw the plan. You didn't get an unlucky sprint. You got a "small change" that took out three downstream teams and two weeks you didn't have.
Nobody warned you the pin was tucked behind water. You found out on your backswing.
That's the job. Not because you're bad at it — because complex projects, like championship golf holes, are designed to punish improvisation. The hazards aren't random. They're placed. Repeatable. And almost always survivable — if you know they're there before you're standing over the ball.
Most PM training teaches you the swing. Nobody hands you the yardage book.
Your Guide Has Played This Course Before
Jesús Guevara — PMP, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Master's in Project Management
Family. Love. Life. The things the game is always really about.
I'm Jesús Guevara. My grandfather caddied at Club de Golf Chapultepec in Mexico and taught me that patience and strategy aren't optional extras — they're the whole game. I caddied too, first to learn, later to pay for college after my father lost his job.
Years later, a regular player invited me to caddie for him at a tournament in Cuernavaca — a course I'd never seen. I was terrified. A caddie's whole job is knowing the terrain, and I knew nothing about this one. I asked a local caddie where the hidden trouble was. He just looked at me and said, "Why don't you use the yardage book?" He handed me one like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
It changed the round completely. We were still facing blind shots on unfamiliar ground — but now we had something documented, specific, prepared by people who'd studied that exact terrain before us. That's not motivation. That's not theory. That's a cold, specific record of where the trouble sits, written by someone who paid to find it, so you don't have to.
That's this book. Eighteen of the toughest holes in golf — from TPC Sawgrass to Oakmont — each one mapped to a real project management hazard through Initiation, Planning, Execution, Monitoring & Control, and Closing. Every chapter closes at the Caddie's Corner, where I tell you what actually happened. What I got right, what I got wrong, and what the gap between the two taught me.
You don't need more inspiration. You need the yardage.
Every Chapter Plays the Same Way
Eighteen holes. Five phases of project management. One repeatable structure.
1. The Hole
You get the real course — TPC Sawgrass, the Road Hole at St Andrews, Oakmont, Cypress Point — and the real history of what it's done to the players who underestimated it.
2. The Lesson
The hole's specific danger — the blind tee shot, the hidden bunker, the constraint you can't negotiate with — maps directly to a named project management hazard. Not a metaphor stretched thin. The actual mechanism.
3. Caddie's Corner
Every chapter closes with the unfiltered version — what Jesús actually did, what went right, what went wrong, and what it cost. No case study gloss. The real story.
Initiation. Planning. Execution. Monitoring & Control. Closing. The book walks all five — the way real projects actually move through them.
FREE — NO STRINGS
Enjoy the First Hole Before You Commit to Play the Whole Course
Chapter 1 — The Island Green Gauntlet — is yours, free. TPC Sawgrass, the island green, and the high-stakes kickoff hazard that ends more projects than any other moment in the lifecycle. Read it before you decide the rest of the book is worth your time.
One email. The chapter, and nothing else you didn't ask for.
The Course Doesn't Get Easier. You Just Get the Yardage.
The PM Yardage Book
Project Management Lessons From The Toughest Golf Holes In The World
By Jesús Guevara, PMP
© 2026 Jesús Guevara. All rights reserved.