The Project Manager's Partner : A step-by-Step Guide to Project Management, Second Edition

Rating:
Summary: Great Foundational Guidebook
Review: As the leader of the Project Management Office and the initiator of project management standards for a large metropolitan school district, I needed a reference to give my new project managers an introduction to the things I was asking them to do. I found this book to be an excellent reference for that purpose. Also using the associated training program, I have offered very effective training classes for many people throughout our school district.

In adapting project management standards for our district, I also drew upon many of the princples outlined so effectively in this book. It makes project management easy to understand for people who have little or no exposure to the concepts.

I also found that I, as a veteran of many years of project management, found many excellent refreshers and reminders for the best practices of how we should pursue project management.

I would recommend this book to new and experienced project managers, alike.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Cookbook for the Desperate...
Review: If you have no background in project management, and no time for formal training, you could do worse than starting with this book. It is full of checklists and charts to handhold you through a project from start to finish. It also gives helpful follow-up references, both in-print and online. For the curious I particularly recommend searching for other publications by the Project Management Institute, and their associated work the Project Management Book of Knowledge (aka the PMBOK).

The Project Manager's Partner (which I got in spiralbound) will disappoint project management veterans because it neither provides any case studies nor tackles some of the thornier issues encountered in real world projects. There is a disk included in the back of the book (3-1/2" floppy) which just repeats some of the pages in the book in case you want to print out the checklists for yourself.

After a fairly brief introduction in the first 30 pages the book spends the next 120 pages covering the nuts and bolts of project management, the project's action items. It is up to you to breathe life into each of these in turn. A handful of helpful appendices follow.

One thing you should keep in mind (or, maybe it's just a reminder to myself) is that a project is generally intended to involve a committed team, and it is not something that you are supposed to scribble away about in a dark corner by yourself (how would your project get funded in that case?). If you don't have a group of interested, or, dare I say, passionate, coworkers to see you through the twists and turns of planning and implementation, your fruits are likely to die on the vine. You will even require moral support, criticism and celebration on occasion together with others to make the effort ultimately worthwhile. As an aside you might want to read "Encouraging the Heart" or similar works on the topic of rewards and recognition.

Please don't snub this book because its writing is inelegant and its structure is simple. For a larger library of project management books, this one definitely has its place, and you will often find yourself dog-earing the pages as you remind yourself what stage you are in and what you should think about working on next (assuming you don't have a software package with reminders, prompts, bells and whistles).

As a criticism, if you are not inspired by your project, this book will not provide the poetry to set you in motion. If you want inspiration to vigorous action, I humbly suggest instead reading Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, which at 700+ pages is ten times as interesting as this book's 150 pages. Hamilton orchestrated a number of "projects" during his late eighteenth-century lifetime, including writing the Federalist Papers, reorganizing the national debt, laying the foundation for the US federal bureaucracy, and lobbying for the controversial Jay Treaty. He also worked himself to exhaustion on a number of occasions, and was embroiled in a major adultery scandal, so make sure you balance any enthusiasm you take from Hamilton's life with some time for mellowing out.