Project Management: It’s all bollocks! (Book Review)

Find out what we think of this short, sharp, sweary(!) introduction to very essentials of project management

Overview

  • The aim of this book is “to pick over the sadly inadequate body of knowledge that is project management today, and generally challenge just about everything, eliminating that which you don’t need to bother to learn about, or should already know, leaving you only with the parts that will give you the results you want.”
  • The book is targeted at “…those ‘projects as usual project managers’ who will drive most of the change inside organisations tomorrow and beyond, and who really need help to do that”

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Agile Retrospectives: Making good teams great (Book Review)

Overview

  • The aim of the book is to introduce a structure for retrospectives and to walk the reader through planning, designing and leading a retrospective, with activities and guidance on how to use them
  • The book appears to be aimed at people who want to use retrospectives in their organizations, whether these organisations are currently using Agile techniques or not.

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Images of Projects (Book Review)

This book recommends that project practitioners should consciously view projects through multiple “lenses” or “filters” to gain different perspectives. This approach directs attention to project aspects that might not otherwise be considered, which will affect the action taken, and hence the results obtained.

Considerable repetition of the principles and case study content (mainly to make it easier to use for reference), and overlap between the images caused me to have several déjà vu moments in reading it straight through, but the approach should be useful to PMs (on projects and programmes) and PMOs (to challenge PMs on their view of projects, and to think about portfolios) at all career stages. Continue reading “Images of Projects (Book Review)”

Project Psychology (Book Review)

This book addresses a gap in the Project Management literature – how people and their behaviours contribute to project failure, and shows the reader how psychology can improve the chances of project success. Continue reading “Project Psychology (Book Review)”

Gower Handbook of People in Project Management (Book Review)

Let me start by saying that this is BIG book. As it would take me a very long time to read the whole thing (and I doubt that the book is meant to be used that way) I will base my review on a selection of chapters that appeal to me rather than the whole thing.

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