Just Enough Project Management: The Indispensable Four-Step Process for Managing Any Project, Better, Faster, Cheaper

My team was looking for a resource to help us expand our knowledge of project management. We have an online certification available but after previewing a few of the classes, we knew we wanted something easy. This book is the perfect quick and dirty synopsis of managing a project. It's all here, organized well and easy to reference. The group liked it so much, we bought on for everyone in the leadership class at our organization.

I was looking for a good basic book to recommend to some PM-phobic coworkers and found the Idiot's and Dummie's editions rather pale and useless. I especially appreciate Cook's emphasis on using just the right amount of PM and not letting the PM process overwhelm the actual work! This book was exactly what I was looking for. Not too PMBOK-heavy and not too dimwit-light.

This book is about right for a new project manager or a small project (hopefully these would both go together but so often it does not). It is also quite useful for an experienced project manager of a smaller project looking for that line that separates the least amount of control from sheer negligence. This book is a little heavier than that, but still pretty light. It is not quite as useful as the Dummies series in terms of a full service solution but really, despite the titles, those are not for novices. This book has a reasonable enough approach and reasonable enough templates to implement it. The drawback I found was that the author uses relatively trivial illustrative "projects" so that newbie can understand the principles without getting hung up on details. The problem is even as a trained project manager the examples of PM applied to such simple things as "weekend at the country cabin" projected precisely the image of absurd over-control that is the thing that frightens PM opponents in the first place. For a real newbie, it could even more scary because if that is what you have to do for something so obviously simple, how much overhead goes with a real project? That is really a minor quibble, though. If you are introducing a novice to the idea of PM, or if you are introducing PM to a nervous organization, this book might be a good place to start as a base case. It is certainly about the closest thing I have found in the past months of looking for such a solution.