By Scott Berkun
First Edition April 2005
Pages: 392 (More details)
(Average of 2 Customer Reviews)
Price: $39.95 USD, $55.95 CAD, £28.50 GBP
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In The Art of Project Management, you'll learn from a veteran manager of software and web development how to plan, manage and lead projects. This personal account of hard lessons learned over a decade of work in the industry distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice. Inspiring, funny, honest, and compelling, this is the book you and your team need to have within arms reach. It will serve you well with your current work, and on future projects to come.
Full Description
- How to make things happen
- Making good decisions
- Specifications and requirements
- Ideas and what to do with them
- How not to annoy people
- Leadership and trust
- The truth about making dates
- What to do when things go wrong
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Book details
Title:
The Art of Project Management
First Edition: April 2005
ISBN: 0-596-00786-8
Pages: 392
Average Customer Reviews: (Based on 2 Reviews)
Featured customer reviews
Project managment for any project professional
Rating:
2006-01-07 15:25:16
Everett_L
[Reply | View]
reviewed by Everett Larsen
Documentation Specialist, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Rouses Point, NY
January 2006
How is project management related to the work that technical communicators do, such as technical writing, user interface design, content management, or help authoring? After all, many technical communicators support projects that are managed by someone from another technical area in a company, perhaps a software engineer or web product manager. Freelancers and contractors, on the other hand, often may find themselves serving as jacks-of-all-trades for their own project organizing, scheduling, and delivery of information products, independent of much team involvement. In either case, a knowledge of the basics of project management can help when it comes to relating to other development team members, or just meeting a client's delivery expectations. The Art of Project Management is relevant for any technical professional who becomes involved in any aspect of projects of any size.
This recent (2005) book by Scott Berkun is one that technical communicators (or anyone else) can find useful. The term "Art" in the title indicates how the often dry topic of project management is presented. Berkun takes a big-picture view of the entire team-based, multi-disciplinary nature of project management without advocating any particular formula or engineering strategy. He uses his 10 years of experience as a program (project) manager at Microsoft as a source for many of the real-life situations used to illustrate basic concepts, but the book's value extends well beyond the realm of software engineering. Indeed, The Art of Project Management can be as readable and relevant for a mechanical or civil engineer as for a web application designer.
The book is organized into three main sections, Plans, Skills, and Management, and is preceded by a brief introduction to the history of project management and the role of project managers. Berkun's writing style is refreshingly informal, and each chapter within each section is self-contained, to allow for the reader who prefers to browse, as opposed to following a linear reading sequence. In addition, each chapter wraps up with a summary of key points for review and reflection. Jargon is almost completely absent from Berkun's discussion, and acronyms and abbreviations are minimal, so the text scans easily.
The existing body of project management knowledge carries some fairly heavy baggage in terms of critical path task analysis, schedule dependencies, Gantt and Pert charting, resource allocation, and milestone definition. Berkun's approach acknowledges these formal aspects of the project management discipline, but he also presents a corresponding spectrum of "soft skills" that project managers and project team members should use to function successfully over the course of any development project.
Much of the work in a project is related to making things happen, and making those things happen at the right times. These are key strategic considerations for project leadership. Berkun links the project manager's ability to set priorities to his/her ability to say no to priorities that are not critical to project success. He also discusses tactics for the mid-game and end-game stages of a project, and describes how to develop clear measurements that actually indicate a project's progress.
The final chapter is on politics and the effective application of political power. Politics has become a suspect term in the present day, but Berkun shows that politics is the way that groups of people collaborate to get something done. He discusses how to use political power effectively, and also how to avoid misusing it. He presents suggestions on how to influence meetings, and how to identify key political constraints to a project.
The Art of Project Management is a good reference book for anyone regularly involved in development or engineering projects, at any level. It is not a complete course for the new project manager, but it supports and supplements existing project management training with additional "soft skill" considerations that would otherwise be difficult to locate and apply in this context. The book is accessible to anyone involved in project activities, and contains no software tool references or flavor of the month management jargon that will render it dated in the immediate future.
practical, well-written advice for project managers
Rating:
2005-06-24 09:15:26
dave graham
[Reply | View]
As someone relatively new to project management from the managing side, but having considerable experience of being managed, I picked up this book to see if I could pick up any tips. I'm glad I did. Scott has managed to distill a huge amount of information and guidance into a very readable work, avoiding the pitfall of so many other books where they end up being dry and dull.
Scott's style is lively and witty, with a mix of the technical jargon, followed up with excellent advice and guidance. The book is split into three sections: Plans, skills and Management. Each section is further broken down in to the core skills and approaches needed to get your project up and running.
I've put a lot of what I've read into practice, and have noticed immediate results - I can now back up my 'gut feel' for how to do stuff with concrete examples of 'why' that approach is best.
It doesn't matter what size of team or organisation you manage, this book *will* help. Do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. If you're being managed rather than managing, buy a copy and give it to *your* manager, then sit back and enjoy the results.
Media reviews
"How I managed so long without this book baffles the mind."
-- Richard Stoakley, Group Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
"This book comes with true pactical advice from a credible in-the-trenches manager and covers more of the people aspect of project management than the nuts-and-bolts of actually managing the technical aspects of a project. It is a handy reference that deserves a place in your reference library."
-- Jackie Damrau, Technical Communication
"The practical suggestions for prioritization, and practical techniques to know when you, as a manager, are not being effective...are excellent and born from experience. Reading The Art Of Project Management has, I believe, made me a more effective project manager, and not just in computer programming realms. This book belongs on the shelf, if not in the pocket, of every working independent consultant alive. "
-- David Nicol, Kansas City Perl Mongers
"When I received The Art of Project Management, I said to myself, 'Oh goody, Sun Tzu has finally written a book on project management.' I figured I had an excellent sleep aid for those nights I could not drop off right away. I could not have been more wrong. For a topical book, The Art of Project Managementwas a fun read and an educational experience. It is written with tongue-in-cheek wit and humor, as well as a clear focus. Considering all the project management training I have taken, I wish more instructors had Berkun’s timing, knowledge, and ability to make the reader glad to have visited this normally desert-dry subject."
-Ron Goodwin, StickyMinds.com, December 2005
"I've been working professionally as a software engineer for several years and I learned more in the first 100 pages of this book than from my years of experience in the industry."
--Dan Hersam, Blogcritics.org, July 2005
"...the book is a quick and engaging read--mainly because it avoids the trap of prescribing one management methodology and boring you to death with all the minutiae of how to fill out charts and build checklists so that you know you're executing it correctly. Instead, Berkun suggests that if you're spending all your time executing a methodology, you've forgotten what project management is really about: helping people work together to accomplish a shared goal. To that effect, The Art of Project Management is a humanistic and realistic collection of ideas for dealing with the issues that project managers face every day... It's just too bad that it wasn't published sooner. Most of us can think of a particularly bad manager or two who could have made our jobs less miserable had they owned a copy and referred to it often."
--Amit Asaravala, Software Development Magazine, July 2005
