Manage It!: Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management

Manage It! will help you understand how to manage projects effectively, taking into account the needs of the people working on the project as well as the needs of the business sponsors. In this regard Johanna Rothman follows in the steps of authors like Jerry Weinberg in showing you how to set up a project environment that helps software developers be more effective and thus be better able to deliver value to their customers. This book has lots of pragmatic advice on how to make progress and issues visible, how to plan a project, and most everything else you need to help a project come to a good conclusion. This book is unique in that while it discusses the benefits of agile lifecycles, it shows you how to make progress in a variety of software lifecycles, and how to introduce techniques that will help your team to be more effective even if they don't really "fit" into your defined process. Buy this book if you want to be a more effective project manager (or technical lead who works with project managers), or if you want to be more agile but are not sure how. What I liked most about this book is the focus on how project management processes can help people be more (or less) effective; an understanding of the primary role of people in a project is key to being more agile.

Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management by Johanna Rothman is the best project management reference I've ever read, and I've seen my share of project management tomes. Here's what I like best about the book: it's not theological. By this I mean Rothman doesn't advocate one "true" way of running projects. She is very careful to be continually cognizant of context when she talks about different approaches you might take. In this sense, she is very situational about prescribing solutions, which I like because it helps a project manager develop what I think is a critical attribute of a good project manager: good judgment. One of my favorite chapters is Recognizing and Avoiding Schedule Games, which uses comic art and prose to explain and fix schedule games that can occur on projects. Here are a few from the book: - Bring Me a Rock - Hope Is Our Most Important Strategy - Queen of Denial - Sweep Under the Rug - 90% Done and so on, for a total of 16 entertaining schedule games that every project manager eventually needs to face. Rothman is an entertaining writer with a knack for interesting prose and practical advice. Unlike most PM books I've read, I've not found anything yet where I was inclined to ignore her advice or felt an approach would require too much work and yield too little benefit. She definitely has a propensity toward simple, sustainable approaches to project management, something I sincerely appreciate due to my strong disdain for any approach with substantial overhead. Another great feature of this book is you can read it out of order, either by opening it randomly or by simply reading the sections that interest you at the moment or that apply to problems you are struggling with. Buy it. Try it. It's worth it.

Every organization/team is different, the things that work well for one may or may not be applicable for another. It is not a beginner's book or a step by step guide to software project management. It's a great reference on things you can expect, what you can do about it and why you would want to do it that way. The great thing about this book is that it gives you the information to determine which practices you want to use and how to adapt it to your situation.

The best way for me to describe Manage It! is as a survey course in project management for experienced project managers. You could read this book to get a good flavor for what project managers do, but I don't see it as a first course in becoming a project manager. Experienced project managers typically have grown up with a particular project management method: Waterfall, phase-gate, spiral, agile, Scrum, XP. While Johanna shows a general preference for agile methods, she gives excellent detail on how to work effectively in each method. Don't skip this book because you think you are too experienced for it. Manage It! is packed with great tips for the most seasoned leader.

I've read a few other project management books, including the excellent The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun, my previous favorite. Berkun spent years as a project manager in one company, Microsoft, and his book is basically the Microsoft approach when it's done excellently. Rothman is a project management consultant. She has seen many different companies trying many different project management lifecycles. I would guess that in most cases she doesn't get called in unless her customers are having problems. The fact that she's been doing this for years means that her work is valued by her customers. This difference in experience can be seen comparing this book to Berkun's. Instead of outlining one way to do things, Rothman describes a continuum of project lifecycles from waterfall (what she calls "serial") to agile. She talks about when each is appropriate, things to watch out for in different contexts, and when the odds are against success in each kind of lifecycle. Other topics that are explored in the book include schedule games and how to avoid them, how to manage meetings, how to integrate testing into your project, and others. This is a great book. I'll continue to refer to it during my future projects.