Advanced Project Portfolio Management and the PMO: Multiplying ROI at Warp Speed

Rating:
Summary: Lots of fluff, no real substance
Review: The majority of this book touts the advantages of a PMO without providing much substance on how to create one. It also assumes that the PMO has authority over the sales and marketing; hence spends a big portion talking about the supply-side and the market-side projects. This book also has too many questionable "surveys" done by the authors and assumptions that are derived from those surveys. Statement such as "From our survey of xxxxx, x% of CIOs believe xxxx" are frequent throughtout the book.

This book seems to have been written to promote the authors' consulting business. Throughout the book, there are "examples" of how companies who implemented the "4x4" process made major improvements and the executives that implemented the process got promoted. Obviously, the book does not describe the "4x4" process; you have to bring the authors to implement it in your organization.

This book has so much reference to Goldratt (author of "The goal" and "Critical Chain") that you are better off just reading Goldratt's books.

If I had been completely new to Project Management and PMO, I may have learned a little bit about a PMO after reading this book's 400+ pages, but for someone who has some knowledge of Project Management, this book was a total waste of my time and money.

Rating:
Summary: Great Read
Review: This book is an easy read and is chock full of useful examples and valuable mechanisms for anyone running or starting a PMO.

Rating:
Summary: how to make your projects work for your business
Review: This book is great.
It provides a comprehensive, step by step approach to project management.
It gave us some outstanding tips and insights that enabled our projects to deliver more with less and have greater impact on our business. Reading this book provided us with a robust governance structure, tools, processes and frameworks which followed through to the bottom line. The benefit of implementing the concepts of this book blew us away.
It is a must read for project managers and project management executives.