Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme

An excellent book on management of IT projects. The author discusses three different kinds of project management: Traditional, Adaptive and Extreme. The book is worth the purchase price for just the discussion on the Traditional project management method. The material about "Adaptive" and "Extreme" variations are icing on the cake.What I like about this book is that the author effectively acknowledges the shortcomings of traditional project management and does not harp on its dogma. The material on adaptive project management offers a way out for those projects where the method of implementation is so unknown that traditional full-court project management practices will only hurt and not help. Much of the information on adaptive and extreme project management is similar to the "extreme programming" methodology, but specifically targeted towards a project manager.I think this book is an excellent purchase. It is well written and succinct (unlike the 1000 pages of bullet-points from a competing author). Other reasons to purchase the book are its reasonable price and the fact that you get a trial version of Microsoft Project 2002 with it. I wish the author had gone into greater depth about earned value. I have found earned value difficult to do without good support from the project management tool (calculating BCWS for example is tedious to do by hand); every time I tried to do earned value for a real project using MP98 or MP2000 the tool has crashed on me. In summary I believe that this is an excellent book, and should be read by every project manager.

There is a complete PM education in this fairly compact book. The third edition touches upon non-traditional project management. In other words, project management in real life as opposed to what is in most every textbook.To me the value of the third edition lies in Robert Wysocki's recognition of projects where either the goal is clear but the methods aren't, or where even the goal is unclear. These types of projects seem to predominate in IT. This book is worth purchasing for the insight that the authors bring into the non-traditional non-textbook real-life projects.The prose is clearly written and reads very tightly. Contrast this to the random collection of thoughts in Kerzner's book. This book is written for the practitioner, though someone taking a college course in project management would also benefit.Excellent book, at an excellent price. You can't go wrong.

I find this book superior to Harold Kerzner's respectable text on project management with the definitions, examples, and overall layout of the book being clearer and more easily understandable. The principle obstacle to engineering management (and project management in general) is the precarious "balancing act" managers have to maintain proper technical quality within a reasonable budget and timeline. This book is succinct in presenting this and comes with an informative CD-ROM for further studies. It is a highly recommended addition to any manager's library.

After having read dozen of books on this specific topic, I believe that this book is a remarkable tool for an experienced Project Manager. Wysocki,Beck and Crane did a very good job, because they have analyzed in a layman's language the most significant issues on this field. Very applicable information, well structured with easy to understand and implement examples. Their approach is customer orientated and one can learn how to monitor and control the process of a project, organize, recruit and manage a project team as well as estimate the length of a project. However, it addresses to experienced Project Managers with hands-on experience on CPM, Network scheduling and PERT method.

The knowledge offered by the authors is easy to read, yet structured and very applicable in today's chaotic project environment. The How to use a JPP session to construct and analyze a project network is really good. The result of its application is impressive. The milestone charts introduced to monitor and control project progress is unique. A good investment for any practioner of project management.