You've just been handed your department's biggest project and you probably aren't sure where to even begin. Whether you have 6 months or 6 weeks to complete it, being an effective project manager can make all the difference to the end result. Absolute Beginner's Guide to Project Management can help you quickly become an effective and efficient project manager when time matters most. Through topics such as "building a project budget and schedule" to "managing vendors," this book will guide you through what works and what doesn't based on tried and true practices. Your learning will be focused on the skills and qualities of effective project managers, leadership styles and project trends, including information technology, outsourcing and virtual teams. Let Absolute Beginner's Guide to Project Management help you take your project from start to finish.
Good Project Management Book This is a good project management book for beginners. It presents a lot of material in an easy-to-understand format. However, be warned that it is not compatible with the Project Management Standard (PMBOK Guide) by PMI. This is not necessarily a bad thing...project management is a wide field. Recommended.
An OK Book This is a mediocre book on project management. There is some good information in there...However, project management is a very mature field and there is a standard for it...this book is not compatible with the PMBOK Guide that holds the standard for the project management. It's ok to use it as long as you know it. Also the flow of the coverage is not very logical...but it's an ok book...
Full of Information I have re-read a number of books immediately after reading them for the first time. Re-reading well-written fiction is of course a pleasure, but I usually reserve this technique for non-fiction that is hard to understand or very dense, and I may re-read immediately after the first read or months or years later.
This book is the first I have decided to re-read before I even finished it. The information presented is so full of useful knowledge that I realized I would forget most of the points while I was taking in the newer stuff. With the diagrams and summaries there is a vast amount of content here.
I have one small criticism that I'd like to make. The book shows common-sense techniques for project management, and on subjects like this we feel we could do the job based on instinct. I think that the book, instead of being almost exclusively saying DO THIS, should have a few examples of DON'T DO THIS. Stories that involve mistakes and disasters tend to make the lesson more memorable.
I have written several books, and I have rarely been more impressed at how the author handles huge amounts of information.
Anyway, this book is worth five stars.
EDIT: Forgot to mention it, but the book has a dangerous typo. On page 208, the book says "Exclude" but the word intended is "Exude" - in this case, that's almost 180 degrees from the intended meaning.
And a big Hi! to my loyal fans. Glad you trust what I say.
The Bible of Project Management I have been practicing project management/program management and PMO management for 40 years. This is not only a great reference book for all PM's of any sophistication but it should be the Textbook for Technical Colleges and Universities for Project Management courses. I hold it in the same group as the Capers & Jones book on software engineering
Missing the practical approach This is one of the better books about PMBOK-based ProjectManagement. But what I really miss, is a practical explanation of how to switch theory to reality. For example: The PMBOK defines 44 processes. Some of them have to be done one time (e.g. defining a Project Charter), but many process steps have to be done daily, weekly, monthly and with different participants. So, what I miss is a description how to organize all these processes during a concrete project including a project plan with all these process steps defined as meetings. This book is a really good introduction to PM and it helps to understand every PMBOK process. But when trying to use this methodology in daily work, you dont know what steps to do with whom and when. I simply miss a kind of project calendar showing how to spread these processes over the timeline.
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