Alpha Project Managers: What the Top 2% Know That Everyone Else Does Not

The book provides information from different perspectives, making it easy to understand the value of what you are doing (or should be doing), and providing contrasting information for better context and understanding. Many of the lessons learned are simple, and all make perfect sense. The book is an easy read that provides both objective and subject information to make its case. It contains many valuable lessons for every project manager. I would recommend that anyone serious about being good at project management invest a few hours in reading the book and looking for ways that they can improve their approach and skills.

The authors provide a well researched overview on what works for others when running a project. As far as business books go, this one is an enjoyable read that will yield a few new ideas for improving the way you work.

I learned a lot from Alpha Project Managers: What the Top 2% Know That Everyone Else Does Not. This book explores the methods and mindsets of the really great PMs - the ones who really seem to know how to get things done, whose projects succeed, whose customers love them. One finding that surprised me was that seemingly minor habits of a project manager can have a major impact on the project he/she leads. The book is especially valuable for its anecdotes and quotes from the managers who participated in the Alpha study. I really benefitted from reading what the most successful had to say - they think about and approach projects differently than I do, so their insights were eye-openers for me. I also found myself thinking about different people I'd worked with and how much better our projects could have been if they'd followed some of the practices described in this book. I definitely recommend this title. It's not a lengthy read but stimulates a lot of thinking for the time invested in it.

Project Management has grown to be a well defined field in recent years. The publication in 1987 of the first PMBOK Guide (A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge) began to define a project management standard developed by the nonprofit Project Management Institute (PMI). This has lead to certification exams and procedures, as well as to companies such as the authors Velociteach to teach about project management. The old cliche however, seems to apply that some practitioners of the profession are simply better at it than others. In this book Mr. Crowe has gone to considerable effort to identify a few of the best project managers. He started with 3,000 project managers, narrowed this down to 860 in the first cut, and finally identified 2% of these 860 or eighteen project managers who were at the absolute top of their profession. With these eighteen people identified, a great deal of work was done in an attempt to discover what made these eighteen the absolute top of their profession. What are the things they did differently, more completely, or simply better than did the other 858. The details are to many and varied to list in a short review, but are at least interesting if not vital information to the professional project manager.

I heard the author speak at a Project Management Institute (PMI) chapter meeting in Indianapolis and he really did a great job with this research. Book would be good for self assessment of your own strengths and areas for development in terms of how clients perceive and rate strong (alpha) project managers. I highly recommend this text for anyone involved in true project management.