Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice) Revised Edition

by Scott Berkun (Author)

198 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0596517717

ISBN-10: 0596517718

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In the updated edition of this critically acclaimed and bestselling book, Microsoft project veteran Scott Berkun offers a collection of essays on field-tested philosophies and strategies for defining, leading, and managing projects. Each essay distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice, and the new edition now adds more value for leaders and managers of projects everywhere. Based on his nine years of experience as a program manager for Internet Explorer and lead program manager for Windows and MSN, Berkun explains to technical and non-technical readers alike what it takes to get through a large software or web development project. Making Things Happen doesn't cite specific methods, but focuses on philosophy and strategy. Unlike other project management books, Berkun offers personal essays in a comfortable style and easy tone that emulate the relationship of a wise project manager who gives good, entertaining and passionate advice to those who ask. Topics in this new edition include:

How to make things happen
Making good decisions
Specifications and requirements
Ideas and what to do with them
How not to annoy people
Leadership and trust
The truth about making dates
What to do when things go wrong

Complete with a new forward from the author and a discussion guide for forming reading groups/teams, Making Things Happen offers in-depth exercises to help you apply lessons from the book to your job. It is inspiring, funny, honest, and compelling, and definitely the one book that you and your team need to have within arm's reach throughout the life of your project. Coming from the rare perspective of someone who fought difficult battles on Microsoft'sbiggest projects and taught project design and management for MSTE, Microsoft's internal best practices group, this is valuable advice indeed. It will serve you well with your current work, and on future projects to come.

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	The Myths of Innovation	Making Things Happen	Confessions of a Public Speaker
O'Reilly Media presents: Scott Berkun

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Based on his nine years of experience as a program manager for Microsoft’s biggest projects, Berkun explains to technical and non-technical readers alike what it takes to lead critical projects from start to finish. Here are 16 chapters on the critical and common challenges of leading projects and managing teams, diagrams, photography, and war stories of success and failure. Berkun offers practical tools and methods to make sure your projects succeed.

What To Do When Things Go Wrong
From Making Things Happen, Chapter 11

1. Calm down. Nothing makes a situation worse than basing your actions on fear, anger, or frustration. If something bad happens to you, you will have these emotions whether you’re aware of them or not. They will also influence your thinking and behavior whether you’re aware of it or not. (Rule of thumb: the less aware you are of your feelings, the more vulnerable you are to them influencing you.) Don’t flinch or overreact—be patient, keep breathing, and pay attention.

2. Evaluate the problem in relation to the project. Just because someone else thinks the sky has fallen doesn’t mean that it has. Is this really a problem at all? Whose problem is it? How much of the project (or its goals) is at risk or may need to change because of this situation: 5%? 20%? 90%? Put things in perspective. Will anyone die because of this mistake (you’re not a brain surgeon, are you?)? Will any cities be leveled? Plagues delivered on the innocent? Help everyone frame the problem to the right emotional and intellectual scale. Ask tons of questions and get people thinking rather than reacting. Work to eliminate assumptions. Make sure you have a tangible understanding of the problem and its true impact. Then, prioritize: emergency (now!), big concern (today), minor concern (this or next week), bogus (never). Know how long your fuse is to respond and prioritize this new issue against all existing work. If it’s a bogus issue, make sure whoever cried wolf learns some new questions to ask before raising the red flag again.

3. Calm down again. Now that you know something about the problem, you might really get upset (“How could those idiots let happen!?”). Find a way to express emotions safely: scream at the sky, workout at the gym, or talk to a friend. But do express them. Know what works for you, and use it. Then return to the problem. Not only do you need to be calm to make good decisions, but you need your team to be calm. Pay attention to who is upset and help them calm down. Humor, candor, food, and drink are good places to start. Being calm and collected yourself goes a long way toward calming others. And taking responsibility for the situation (see the later section “Take responsibility”), regardless of whose fault it was, accelerates a team’s recovery from a problem.

4. Get the right people in the room Any major problem won’t impact you alone. Identify who else is most responsible, knowledgeable, and useful and get them in together straight away. Pull them out of other meetings and tasks: if it’s urgent, act with urgency, and interrupt anything that stands in your way. Sit them down, close the door, and run through what you learned in step 2. Keep this group small; the more complex the issue, the smaller the group should be. Also, consider that (often) you might not be part of this group: get the people in the room, communicate the problem, and then delegate. Offer your support, but get out of their way (seriously—leave the room if you’re not needed). Clearly identify who is in charge for driving this issue to resolution, whether it’s you or someone else.

5. Explore alternatives. After answering any questions and clarifying the situation, figure out what your options are. Sometimes this might take some research: delegate it out. Make sure it’s flagged as urgent if necessary; don’t ever assume people understand how urgent something is. Be as specific as possible in your expectation for when answers are needed.

6. Make the simplest plan. Weigh the options, pick the best choice, and make a simple plan. The best available choice is the best available choice, no matter how much it sucks (a crisis is not the time for idealism). The more urgent the issue, the simpler your plan. The bigger the hole you’re in, the more direct your path out of it should be. Break the plan into simple steps to make sure no one gets confused. Identify two lists of people: those whose approval you need for the plan, and those who need to be informed of the plan before it is executed. Go to the first group, present the plan, consider their feedback, and get their support. Then communicate that information to the second group.

7. Execute. Make it happen. Ensure whoever is doing the work was involved in the process and has an intimate understanding of why he’s doing it. There is no room for assumption or ambiguity. Have specific checkpoints (hourly, daily, weekly) to make sure the plan has the desired effect and to force you and others in power to consider any additional effort that needs to be spent on this issue. If new problems do arise, start over at step 1.

8. Debrief. After the fire is out, get the right people in the room and generate a list of lessons learned. (This group may be different from the right people in step 4 because you want to include people impacted by, but not involved in, the decision process.) Ask the question: “What can we do next time to avoid this?” The bigger the issue, the more answers you’ll have to this question. Prioritize the list. Consider who should be responsible for making sure each of the first few items happens.

About the Author

Scott Berkun worked on the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft from 1994-1999 and left the company in 2003 with the goal of writing enough books to fill a shelf. The Myths of Innovation is his second book: he wrote the best seller, The Art of Project Management (O'Reilly 2005). He makes a living writing, teaching and speaking. He teaches a graduate course in creative thinking at the University of Washington, runs the sacred places architecture tour at NYC's GEL conference, and writes about innovation, design and management on his personal website.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; Revised edition (April 15, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 410 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0596517718
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0596517717
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.99 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #84,650 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8 in Project Management Software Books
- #110 in Business Project Management (Books)
- #179 in Computer Programming Languages

Customer Reviews:
198 ratings

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Scott Berkun

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Scott Berkun (@berkun) is the best selling author of seven books, including Making Things Happen, The Myths of Innovation, Confessions of a Public Speaker and The Year Without Pants. His work has appeared in the The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Fast Company, The Economist, Forbes Magazine, and other media. He has taught creative thinking at the University of Washington and has been a regular commentator on CNBC, MSNBC and National Public Radio. His many popular essays and entertaining lectures can be found for free on his blog at http://www.scottberkun.com.

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4 star		14%
3 star		10%
2 star		4%
1 star		3%

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Sachmo

Good, not great.

Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2013

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This is a solid book on project management. It covers a lot of fundamentals such as effective communication, decision-making, planning, and problem solving.

It's good and full of a lot of useful information, but not great. Berkun worked at Microsoft and was a project manager on Internet Explorer 1.0 - 5.0.

A caveat - Internet Explorer is not my favorite product (even pre-Mozilla). But it is a complex product that requires extensive analysis, design, development and testing - and Berkun clearly knows the product development process well.

The book does not offer any overall paradigm or methodology for project management. Rather it has short sections on subjects such as 'requirements' where Berkun will share whatever gems of knowledge he amassed in his years at Microsoft. Though I'm normally partial to books where the author presents an overall technique, I do find his anecdotes / advice to be useful. It provides a general context to making good decisions in product development.

The only place where I'd really fault the book is that it leans very heavily to a waterfall process, and some of the advice is definitely more useable in a large organization than in a small one. If the book had less waterfall assumptions, I'd probably be willing to give it 5 stars.

Despite this, Berkun's insights are still quite useful to someone even in a small startup environment, or pursuing product development in an agile framework.

The book can be a bit boring in some sections, but is always informative and offers good advice.

17 people found this helpful

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Tri Le

Good Intro to the Fundamentals of Project Management

Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2018

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Good book covering the common difficulties of project management. Fantastic introduction to the profession with an emphasis on software development but can easily be applied to other projects. Discusses scheduling, smart planning, documentation, idea generation and management, decision-making, communication, relationship-building, strategy and other topics. Would recommend for those who want to get a good idea of some common problems and solutions of project management.

2 people found this helpful

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Chaitali Narla

Dated and uninspiring

Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2020

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I found the ideas presented in this book to be minimally useful. Reading other books with deeper dives into the ideas was better for me (Getting More, Switch, etc). The process of software development as described in the book was also very dated IMO. I finished the book because I started it but wouldn't recommend to anyone.

3 people found this helpful

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Paul

Very well written and gives great advice

Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2021

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I love this book. I stumbled upon Scotts work researching about writing. As a developer I found the ideas about actually building products useful for my own projects. Although I dont do any formal PMing myself, I find the ideas useful and have learned what important strategies and tactics that PMs should employ. Also I really like the clear writing and it is so concise thar I frequently pause to really digest it. 10/10 would recommend for PMs and those who have to work in a project.

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GTRyanA

Funny, intelligent, and helpful

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2012

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I had a friend refer this book to me, and I'm glad that I took the time to read through it. It's a book that is best digested on a chapter by chapter basis, rather than a cover-to-cover read. It doesn't explore ground-breaking concepts. It touches on project management topics, but it doesn't dwell on any single topic for too long. He says several times that there are more detailed books for any given topic, and references many of them. It's a book about how to approach a project, get it done correctly, and how to work with other people through its different phases. I interpreted the primary foci of the book to be completing projects by collaborating effectively with other people and adjusting management methods to fit the project, rather than trying to fit the project into a particular management method.

The book is written in a funny and informal way that allows it to be read and re-read without feeling like you're opening a textbook. I enjoyed how there weren't straight up procedures for exactly how a project manager should go about doing his/her job. There were rough guides, diagrams, anecdotes, and some suggestions for things that a manager could do, but it seemed obvious to me that these were meant to be interpreted and adjusted to fit both the situation and your own style.

I purchased this book on the Kindle. Now that I've read it, I'm considering purchasing an actual copy so I have one to flip through for reference in the future. I plan on referring this book to my coworkers as well. It has helped me define several things that I can work on to improve my success in my current job and any future jobs.

5 people found this helpful

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Ali

Clear Writing and Useful Anecdotes

Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2018

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Good book for a beginner like me wanting to learn more about how to successfully make and execute a plan to get projects off the ground. I particularly enjoyed the author's anecdotes and lessons taken from his own experience. For something like a manual, it's a really enjoyable read!

One person found this helpful

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Scott Cromar

Good Advice and a Fun Read

Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2013

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"Making Things Happen" is a project management book that breaks away from the usual mold. There is so much emphasis on a PMP certification that many project management titles have become dry recitations of the PMBOK. Not so with this book!

The book is eminently readable, and the advice is well-grounded in real-world experience. As I read the book, I found myself taking notes for how to apply the information to deal with issues that were coming up in my own projects.

The tools from the PMBOK are valuable, but there are only so many times you can read a re-hash of an exam cram. "Making Things Happen" was a delightful read that reminded me why it is fun to run a project.

5 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Fast shipping

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2021

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Great product, great value, and fast shipping.

One person found this helpful

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Ian M.

The PM bible

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 11, 2020

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Not for absolute beginners but those fairly new to project management will find it invaluable. Everyobe involved in projects can learn from it.

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 18, 2017

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Fab book

One person found this helpful

Nirmal Lotay

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 7, 2015

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Useful and insightful book for ICT project managers. Bit tech heavy in places. But good.

jonathan ryding

Own this book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 25, 2018

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Insightful and straight to the point. Highly recommend

Alessio

Ottimo libro

Reviewed in Italy on March 22, 2020

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Ottimo libro, che descrive a fondo un argomento molto complesso come il project management

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