Customer Reviews

Alpha Project Managers: What the Top 2% Know That Everyone Else Does Not

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After using his super PMP study guide some time back, I picked up Andy Crowe's `Alpha Project Managers,' published in 2006.

This has to be one of the most under produced books I've ever seen. Crowe essentially self-published on his own Velociteach label. It shows. The graphics are third rate and the cover is pretty bad.

But no matter. The information inside is fascinating. Crowe surveyed over 3,000 project managers and their co-workers/supervisors in order to identify the "top 2%" of project managers ("alpha project managers"). He tried to identify PMs who were consistently rated as excellent by the people they worked with and their customers. Once he found them, he zeroed in on their work habits and PM techniques.

Some of the interesting findings:

# Alphas respond to fewer emails/day and spend less time in meetings than non-alphas, yet people rated them as being more responsive than non-alphas.
# Alphas establish explicit communication expectations, and adhere to them stringently.
# Alphas sent much shorter communications than their non-alpha peers.
# Alphas spent twice as much time in the planning phase of their projects than did non-alphas.
# Alphas used informal networks to get things done much more often than non-alphas (who stuck to formal channels).
# Alphas were much more aware or how their bosses were being measured (ROI, etc.) than non-alphas.

Each of these points (and others) are supported with some useful anecdotes from the PMs themselves. Crowe does a good job trying to help PMs understand these habits and apply them to their own work. This is a text which deserves wider recognition and higher quality production in a second edition.

Recommended. 197pp.

I don't think this book on its own is going to help anybody become an Alpha project manager, but it is interesting and gives you some ideas to start with. This is a non-scientific study, and in a few places you can tell, but for the most part it was well researched and the extrapolations are pretty convincing. It's not an overly long book, so you don't need to invest several weeks of free time to get the major learnings out of it. Recommended for project managers or people who want to be project managers.

I had the pleasure of seeing the author Andy Crowe discuss the findings of this book at the March Tampa PMI meeting so I picked up the book. The theme of the book to me can be summed up from a quote from near the end of the book when Crowe points out that "Professional sprinters often finish within hundredths of a second of each other, yet the ones who win do so consistently". What he is saying is that what separates the Alphas from the average is a kaizen approach to constantly making fine tuning adjustments in how they manage projects. My key take aways from the book where: Alphas take ownership of the project and don't wait for it to be given to them, Alphas focus as much a leading the project as on merely managing the project, Alphas possess a big picture view of how their projects fits into the overall goals and strategies of the company, Alphas take active ownership of the relationships with stakeholders to the project as well as key players throughout the organization, and finally Alphas do more than just manage their projects by taking an active domain intensive value add role on the project as well.

The book was a short but very concise read packed with statistical findings from the research that was performed. The gaps in perceptions between what the Project Manager believed and what the stakeholders believed was very eye opening. I highly recommend this book to any Project Manager interested in surviving and thriving in their career.

I am not sure where to start but here are some major flaws that I see in this book:
* The study includes 860 participants and only 18 are considerred Alphas! My guess is that if they broadened the study to have 5% or 10% alphas, the differences would be even more miniscule than they already are in the book.
* There are so many comparisons that are simply weak, like the amount hours Alphas and non-Alphas seek training. Can you imagine the difference betwen 38 hours for non-alphas versus 45 hours for alphas. It is just utter non-sense to even include this as one of the key differences. The author was clearly trying to fill some extra pages of the book here. This issue alone causes pause about the credibility of the study and the author's understanding of the topic.

* Are the top 2% more confident and optimistic and happier about their jobs? We don't need to buy a book to know this, as these are rhetorical questions. It is almost sad that the author attempts to give validity to his study by presenting percentages and comparative data on such things

This book has a lot of information in the details & background. The explanation and follow-ups are useful in understanding the context of the conclusions. I believe an ongoing review of this study can be useful in continuing the development of a manager. It seems that different aspects of the study would be relevant @ different stages of a PM's growth. I was at the Indianapolis presentation and found the book more interesting, well worth the purchase.

Project Management has grown to be a well defined field in recent years. The publication in 1987 of the first PMBOK Guide (A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge) began to define a project management standard developed by the nonprofit Project Management Institute (PMI). This has lead to certification exams and procedures, as well as to companies such as the authors Velociteach to teach about project management.

The old cliche however, seems to apply that some practitioners of the profession are simply better at it than others. In this book Mr. Crowe has gone to considerable effort to identify a few of the best project managers. He started with 3,000 project managers, narrowed this down to 860 in the first cut, and finally identified 2% of these 860 or eighteen project managers who were at the absolute top of their profession.

With these eighteen people identified, a great deal of work was done in an attempt to discover what made these eighteen the absolute top of their profession. What are the things they did differently, more completely, or simply better than did the other 858.

The details are to many and varied to list in a short review, but are at least interesting if not vital information to the professional project manager.

This book outlines the result of an extensive research study about Project Managers and attempts to answer what makes the top 2% "the best" at what they do?

The books breaks the research resultant data into layman's terms as to what stakeholder's consider a top project manager, what manager's consider a top project manager, what project manager's consider top project manager's, what team members consider top, as well as project sponsors.

The results is a list of key attributes and the parameters of them that seems to provide the opportunity to be successful -- every time.

Anyone going into the field of project management should read this book.

I read this book after purchasing it at a PMI Chapter Event where Andy Crowe was the guest speaker. It is easy to read and goes quickly, good balance of background on the statistics and survey techniques (not too much!), then goes into the different topics. Each chapter is just a few pages, and is very easy to pull out clear actions a project manager could implement right away, with a little bit of self-reflection. The comparison between what the top project managers self-rated, and what their stakeholders and teams really thought about them, is an excellent reminder to get outside our own perceptions and figure out what people really think about the project status and leadership.

I purchased this book and gave it to each of my project managers this past 2010 holiday season, and I'm expecting them to pull in relevant key areas for their personal 2011 goals & objectives. Excellent read, highly recommended.

I found this book extremely valuable. I was already very familiar with Andy Crowe's PMP Prep book before I read this one, and this book makes for an excellent follow-up on advanced leadership topics. I recommend it highly.

The Alpha Project Managers from Andy Crowe is based on The Alpha Study, a survey of over 5000 project managers and stakeholders. This study took a careful look at the practices and attitudes of 860 project managers against thousands of stakeholders. The purpose of this study was to understand what the top performers do that sets them apart. The book gives us a short biographical sketch of the 18 Alphas. You will get insights why those 18 Alphas differ from the rest of the group and how that influences project success. The following eight major areas are explored where top performers stand apart from everybody else:
- Attitude and believe
- Focus and Prioritization
- Communication
- Approach
- Relationships and Conflict
- Alignment
- Issue Management
- Leadership
For every area you get the insights about the questions and answers from the Alpha and the non-Alpha ones. Based on these answers the study went back to the project managers and the stakeholders to find answers on the why by additional questionnaires and interviews. Every area chapter ends with an overview what the Alphas know. E.g. Communication: the greatest disconnect between the two groups seemed to be that Alphas were generally aware of how their message was being received by stakeholders. Alphas took the time to understand stakeholder needs in advance, and how they tailored communication to meet those needs. The Alpha group made reliable and predictable communications a priority, even going so far as using this as a tool to manage stakeholders. They set the gold standard by making their information not only very clear and highly concise, but also relevant to their audience.

If you, as a project manager, want to improve your performance and you know your own strengths and weaknesses, this book can be of great help to you to take a next step.