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New Project Management Book From O'Reilly

I like what I've read in "The Art of Project Management" so far. I have a lot of formal training in project management, and I find that most project management books fail to be useful. Most fall into the plan-centric model. The problems are that planning is just the start, and no project ever goes by the initial plan. The plan is your guess at how things will go. Then reality intrudes in the form of changing constraints; technical problems like a key person getting sick for a week or the DBA who forgets to test tape restores and discovers that the backups were write-only.

This book looks to be more focused on what you have to do to get the project done than to make nice charts with dependencies and resource leveling. So far my favorite books on managing technical people and projects aren't project management books per se. Tops on my list are "Peopleware" by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, and "The Mythical Man-Month"by Fred Brooks.

There's a sample chapter from "The Art of Project Management" available at the O'Reilly site titled How to figure out what to do.

Posted by Mark Thursday, June 09, 2005 9:49:00 PM | permalink |