Category: Book review

Mitch Lacey's book »The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for Your First Year« is an extremely useful book that helps new Scrum practitioners take the first step from learning about Scrum to actually doing it. The book does not explain the basics of Scrum and its artifacts because it assumes that the reader is well informed already and wants to go from theory to practice. Each of the 30 chapters in this book jumps right in and gives practical advice that may be used in a real Scrum project. Most of the chapters are structured similarly. At the beginning of the chapter there is a real life story as an example. Some of the topics that are covered in the chapters include: getting people on board, optimizing team performance, determining team velocity, implementing team roles, establishing core hours, presenting the case for a full time scrum master, establishing good engineering practices, understanding when we are done, release planning, decomposing user stories,...

PMI published the newest, fifth edition of the Project Mangement Body of Knowledge or PMBOK, the worldwide recognized project management manual. As with each new edition of the PMBOK there are numerous minor updates. This time, however, there is a major update and that is the addition of a completely new chapter. It deals with a new knowledge area that should be familiar to all project managers: stakeholder management. I have to wonder what was the reason for introducing a completely new knowledge area that a project manager should master? Was this knowledge area not required previously? Are there any new circumstances that caused the need for a new knowledge area? Or was this knowledge there all the time, it just wasn't grouped together in a chapter but rather split in processes here and there? A detailed reading of the new chapter reveals that it is indeed the latter. Project Stakeholder Management was there in previous versions of the PMBOK, covered in several...

In their book Green Project Management authors Richard Maltzman and David Shirley tell us that project managers are inherently green because they constantly strive to decrease costs, increase business value and protect scarce resources. This all contributes to being green. Companies are increasingly more aware of the need to become green and therefore it makes sense that project management becomes green as well. The authors introduce a new term that denotes the level at which a project is green. The term is greenality and was chosen because it sounds similar to quality. They argue that greenality can be managed the same way as quality, for example, we could introduce a greenality management plan. We could measure greenality both in the project sense and in the end product sense. They even suggested that greenality might be added to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) as a new knowledge area. They further explain the analogy between greenality and quality by introducing the cost of...

The book »Alpha Project Managers: What the top 2% know that everyone else does not« presents results from a research among a large number of project managers conducted by the company Velociteach. The purpose of the research was to discover what the best project managers do differently as well as to find out what they know that everyone else does not. The researchers invited more than 3000 project managers to participate in the study and they finally chose 860 qualified participants who fulfilled strict criteria to be included in the research. Among others, participants must have had at least a certain number of hours of project management experience, they must have led at least one project worth more than a certain amount of money and they had to secure the participation of their superiors, team members and clients. The first part of the research was to rate the project managers. This was done by their superiors, team members and clients while the project managers themselves...

PMI introduced the »New Media Council« in 2009 whose members were tasked with writing blogs, delivering web presentations and do anything related with modern social media technologies. Their goal is on one hand to promote PMI in the web environment and on the other hand to understand how new trends in social media affect project managers. Elizabeth Harrin, a member of this council and author of the popular blog A Girl's Guide to Project Management, authored a book on the topic of how to successfully utilize social media in project management. According to her, social media is »Collaboration and Communication with Purpose«. Since the work of a project manager is mostly communication, this fits together well. In her book the author first describes different media that are available to project managers, such as messaging systems, videoconferencing systems, podcasts and webcasts, blogs, microblogs, social networks, Wikis and more. She indicates how each technology could be incorporated into project management. She then discusses implementing social media...

Project managers often work in matrix organizations where they don't have formal authority over their project team members. They have to discuss and negotiate their resources with the functional managers or other stakeholders who are involved with the project. In addition, project managers typically don't authorize their own project budgets and other project constraints, their only job is to get the project done within the defined constraints. Although it might seem that it is extremely difficult to successfully complete a project under such circumstances, Tom Kendrick's book Results without Authority enlightens us that there is another side to this story. Project managers actually do have many levers and methods at their disposal that they can utilize to succeed in their projects even without formal authority. The book focuses on the three most important aspects of project management in matrix organizations: communication, business processes and measuring results. As with any other project, not just limited to matrix organizations, project managers must be strong in communication....