The New Project Management: Tools for an Age of Rapid Change, Corporate Reengineering, & Other Business Realities

This book is solid. The language is not overly academic while conveying textbook type information in a semi novel type format - easy to read and thoroughly enjoyable. The book is excellent for people new to project management because it is comprehensive without being overly technical, that is, it covers a broad range of topics and ties them together to present a holistic approach to project management. For this reason it would serve well for corporate training programs. Counter to that, the book is also a "should read" for top managers - to remind them of their role in creating a sound project management environment.

This book is a very good guide to the secondary issues of project management. The author goes into detail on topics such as managing complexity, extending projects to include operations and support, building teams with borrowed resources, resource estimation and a variety of other topics. The topics are valid, the writing is clear, but the writing style is very verbose. On the one hand, the topics are relevant only for project management professionals, but the writing style is for beginning project managers. This is a good book to read after to get your PMP certification.

This second edition is a minor update to the original that was published in 1994. When the first edition was published business process reengineering was in vogue. Today we're still doing reengineering, but it goes by the moniker of "organizational change management". A rose by any other name; however, this book remains one of the only project management texts that stays focused on reengineering and organizational change projects while including traditional project planning, scheduling and control techniques.What makes this book unique is the way the author tackles organizational politics head on, and the sage advice given to deal with it. These comprise the main theme of Part I's first three chapters, which address the business environment, how to bring order out of chaos and engaging change. The final two chapters in Part I cover risk management and customer satisfaction - two main critical success factors for any project, but are especially important in organizational change projects.Part II starts with a chapter that is boldly titled "Acquiring Political Skills and Building Influence" and segues into another topic that most PM books sidestep: "Building Teams with Borrowed Resources". If you've ever attempted employing matrix management or virtual teams you'll appreciate the advice given in this chapter. The author also gives an excellent discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of self directed teams, which may be ideal in theory, but are not easy to achieve in practice. Chapter 8 in this part is a well written piece on project selection techniques, which reflects the author's approach that is better documented in a book that he coauthored titled "The Project Office".The remainder of the book is focused on traditional PM techniques, including estimating, outsourcing considerations, earned value (now part of the PMI PMBOK), and project metrics.If you are involved in organizational change projects this book is the best resource because of the way it combines organizational change management with traditional PM techniques.