Customer Reviews

Manage It!: Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management by Johanna Rothman is the best project management reference I've ever read, and I've seen my share of project management tomes. Here's what I like best about the book: it's not theological. By this I mean Rothman doesn't advocate one "true" way of running projects. She is very careful to be continually cognizant of context when she talks about different approaches you might take. In this sense, she is very situational about prescribing solutions, which I like because it helps a project manager develop what I think is a critical attribute of a good project manager: good judgment.

One of my favorite chapters is Recognizing and Avoiding Schedule Games, which uses comic art and prose to explain and fix schedule games that can occur on projects. Here are a few from the book:
- Bring Me a Rock
- Hope Is Our Most Important Strategy
- Queen of Denial
- Sweep Under the Rug
- 90% Done
and so on, for a total of 16 entertaining schedule games that every project manager eventually needs to face.

Rothman is an entertaining writer with a knack for interesting prose and practical advice. Unlike most PM books I've read, I've not found anything yet where I was inclined to ignore her advice or felt an approach would require too much work and yield too little benefit. She definitely has a propensity toward simple, sustainable approaches to project management, something I sincerely appreciate due to my strong disdain for any approach with substantial overhead.

Another great feature of this book is you can read it out of order, either by opening it randomly or by simply reading the sections that interest you at the moment or that apply to problems you are struggling with.

Buy it. Try it. It's worth it.

The best way for me to describe Manage It! is as a survey course in project management for experienced project managers.

You could read this book to get a good flavor for what project managers do, but I don't see it as a first course in becoming a project manager. Experienced project managers typically have grown up with a particular project management method: Waterfall, phase-gate, spiral, agile, Scrum, XP. While Johanna shows a general preference for agile methods, she gives excellent detail on how to work effectively in each method.

Don't skip this book because you think you are too experienced for it. Manage It! is packed with great tips for the most seasoned leader.

I've read a few other project management books, including the excellent The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun, my previous favorite. Berkun spent years as a project manager in one company, Microsoft, and his book is basically the Microsoft approach when it's done excellently.

Rothman is a project management consultant. She has seen many different companies trying many different project management lifecycles. I would guess that in most cases she doesn't get called in unless her customers are having problems. The fact that she's been doing this for years means that her work is valued by her customers.

This difference in experience can be seen comparing this book to Berkun's. Instead of outlining one way to do things, Rothman describes a continuum of project lifecycles from waterfall (what she calls "serial") to agile. She talks about when each is appropriate, things to watch out for in different contexts, and when the odds are against success in each kind of lifecycle.

Other topics that are explored in the book include schedule games and how to avoid them, how to manage meetings, how to integrate testing into your project, and others.

This is a great book. I'll continue to refer to it during my future projects.

This book is years of experience condensed to its best. It addresses all important aspects of modern project management. It is objective towards many different processes but it clearly makes the point that agile is the best choice in most cases.

While reading this book, it opened my eyes again and again -- Yep, been there, seen that.

I encourage every project manager to read this book from beginning to end; this will put hooks in your mind to come back later and re-read the appropriate chapter when needed. After having read this book, it makes a great reference. I use it to make sure I have not overseen anything when reaching certain life cycle events.

Thanks Johanna, this book was overdue for a long time!

Manage It! will help you understand how to manage projects effectively, taking into account the needs of the people working on the project as well as the needs of the business sponsors. In this regard Johanna Rothman follows in the steps of authors like Jerry Weinberg in showing you how to set up a project environment that helps software developers be more effective and thus be better able to deliver value to their customers. This book has lots of pragmatic advice on how to make progress and issues visible, how to plan a project, and most everything else you need to help a project come to a good conclusion. This book is unique in that while it discusses the benefits of agile lifecycles, it shows you how to make progress in a variety of software lifecycles, and how to introduce techniques that will help your team to be more effective even if they don't really "fit" into your defined process.

Buy this book if you want to be a more effective project manager (or technical lead who works with project managers), or if you want to be more agile but are not sure how. What I liked most about this book is the focus on how project management processes can help people be more (or less) effective; an understanding of the primary role of people in a project is key to being more agile.

Every organization/team is different, the things that work well for one may or may not be applicable for another. It is not a beginner's book or a step by step guide to software project management. It's a great reference on things you can expect, what you can do about it and why you would want to do it that way. The great thing about this book is that it gives you the information to determine which practices you want to use and how to adapt it to your situation.

Great Managers are made and not born; and this book is the proof for that claim. I am Software Engineer, and purchased this book to grasp quickly to basics of effective Project Management skills that I do lack. From the very first page the book did the work, it shows without assuming prior knowledge a practical roadmap to become efficient and effective Project Manager. In addition I liked to see the mistakes that I have seen industry and the solutions to these mistakes.

Another aspect that pushed me choosing this book is the JOLT award that the book got. I have a deep respect to JOLT award books, and this book is no exception.

Yes, nothing beats experience and common sense but one needs excellent tools (like this book) to combine with relevant experience to achieve the superior results.

Very good read. I read it after I attended a boot camp style PMP course and found her very pragmatic approach to project management refreshing. I'm not surprised at how much I really didn't know about real world project management. Although she presents the materiel in the context of software development environment you do not need development experience to understand the points she makes. I manage audit projects and, with the exception of a few terms, I managed just fine and so can you. She helped me view scheduling and estimating in an entirely new light and talked me into canning some serial status meetings as well.

Plenty of books promise project management skills and most contain concrete, practical information - especially when it's applied on a case-by-case basis meeting certain conditions rather as a global strategy for everything. This book is for software managers but also for business managers who would understand the special applications and methods for building and managing projects. From using life cycles and creating a fine team to managing meetings and multiple projects and goals, MANAGE IT! YOUR GUIDE TO MODERN, PRAGMATIC PROJECT MANAGEMENT is a highly recommended acquisition for any business library.

I have been building software for a long time, leading and managing development teams, and while I know a lot, I know that I don't know everything there is to know about software development. There is always more to learn, ways to improve what we build and how we build it. The challenges, the constant learning, the continuous drive to improve, are all reasons why I have stayed engaged in software development for so long.

In my research and reflection, I find myself reading and re-reading a small number of good books on software development and project management. One of the best of these is Manage It! It has helped to shape my current thinking about software development management, and I like that it helps me with both the why's and the how's - the principles that drive the ways that we can and should develop software; and practical management methods and techniques to build better software, or build software better, or hopefully both. I don't necessarily agree with everything that the book says, my experiences are not always the same, but that's ok. I have found that I don't have to agree with this book completely, and that's why I keep going back to it: because it does not dictate a single approach or prescribe one way of building software; it does not demand that I memorize and follow a recipe.

Manage It! is what it says it is, pragmatic, and that's what makes it valuable, sets it aside from most of the other development / project management books out there.