Effective Project Management

I have worked in a lot of projects, large and small, but all the ones I personally managed were small and run by the S.O.P.M Methodology (Seat-of-the-Pants). When I signed up for a community-college P.M. class, all they wanted to talk about was "soft skills", team bonding, Kum-Bah-Yah stuff. Necessary, but not the nuts-and-bolts. I got my money back - I wanted meat-and-potatoes Project Managment. To me, this book has a good overview of basics with common sense, then some good specific techniques with more detail. Plus, it goes cradle-to-grave. I have not finished, and I have not run the exercises yet. Maybe I'll come back and add a different rating after that. I wouldn't buy it to learn Microsoft Project software.

Well developed description of high-level procedures necessary to the process of "planning to plan." CD includes exercises that can be used with MS Project 4.0, but the book is not tied to any particular program and is definitely not a software manual