The Art of Project Management (book)

The Art of Project Management
Scott Berkun
O'Reilly
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/artprojectmgmt/
US$39.95 CAN$55.95

reviewed by Everett Larsen
Documentation Specialist, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Rouses Point, NY
January 2006

How is project management related to the work that technical communicators do, such as technical writing, user interface design, content management, or help authoring? After all, many technical communicators support projects that are managed by someone from another technical area in a company, perhaps a software engineer or web product manager. Freelancers and contractors, on the other hand, often may find themselves serving as jacks-of-all-trades for their own project organizing, scheduling, and delivery of information products, independent of much team involvement. In either case, a knowledge of the basics of project management can help when it comes to relating to other development team members, or just meeting a client's delivery expectations. The Art of Project Management is relevant for any technical professional who becomes involved in any aspect of projects of any size.

This recent (2005) book by Scott Berkun is one that technical communicators (or anyone else) can find useful. The term "Art" in the title indicates how the often dry topic of project management is presented. Berkun takes a big-picture view of the entire team-based, multi-disciplinary nature of project management without advocating any particular formula or engineering strategy. He uses his 10 years of experience as a program (project) manager at Microsoft as a source for many of the real-life situations used to illustrate basic concepts, but the book's value extends well beyond the realm of software engineering. Indeed, The Art of Project Management can be as readable and relevant for a mechanical or civil engineer as for a web application designer.

The book is organized into three main sections, Plans, Skills, and Management, and is preceded by a brief introduction to the history of project management and the role of project managers. Berkun's writing style is refreshingly informal, and each chapter within each section is self-contained, to allow for the reader who prefers to browse, as opposed to following a linear reading sequence. In addition, each chapter wraps up with a summary of key points for review and reflection. Jargon is almost completely absent from Berkun's discussion, and acronyms and abbreviations are minimal, so the text scans easily.

The existing body of project management knowledge carries some fairly heavy baggage in terms of critical path task analysis, schedule dependencies, Gantt and Pert charting, resource allocation, and milestone definition. Berkun's approach acknowledges these formal aspects of the project management discipline, but he also presents a corresponding spectrum of "soft skills" that project managers and project team members should use to function successfully over the course of any development project.

Much of the work in a project is related to making things happen, and making those things happen at the right times. These are key strategic considerations for project leadership. Berkun links the project manager's ability to set priorities to his/her ability to say no to priorities that are not critical to project success. He also discusses tactics for the mid-game and end-game stages of a project, and describes how to develop clear measurements that actually indicate a project's progress.

The final chapter is on politics and the effective application of political power. Politics has become a suspect term in the present day, but Berkun shows that politics is the way that groups of people collaborate to get something done. He discusses how to use political power effectively, and also how to avoid misusing it. He presents suggestions on how to influence meetings, and how to identify key political constraints to a project.

The Art of Project Management is a good reference book for anyone regularly involved in development or engineering projects, at any level. It is not a complete course for the new project manager, but it supports and supplements existing project management training with additional "soft skill" considerations that would otherwise be difficult to locate and apply in this context. The book is accessible to anyone involved in project activities, and contains no software tool references or flavor of the month management jargon that will render it dated in the immediate future.

This is excellent book and I found there a lot of points to use for improvement in my job. It can be easily used as a reference book because often you need stronger arguments than only you experience and I would recommend to skim the convenient chapter(s) during the project and do such simply process review.

The drawback of this book can be its orientation on the project in large companies. If you work for fifty people big company which is oriented on body-shops, then you would prefer slightly different view.

I consider also some parts verbose. But anyhow I can recommend and I am sure I will use this book in the future and it helps me.

Scott Berkun, this book's author, has produced a new reference for the field of project management, featuring rich content and expert advice.
This book is comprehensive, with a range of topics and examples. Yet more importantly, though, it is the way the book is structured, and the expertise that the author shares.

Highlights: What I like about this book is that the author effectively acknowledges issues facing project management and does not harp on its dogma. Organized into three main sections - Plans, Skills, and Management - typical technical verbosity is almost completely absent from this discourse, leaving acronyms and abbreviations to a minimum.

Although the book flows in a sequence, each chapter can be read independently of the preceding ones, and each chapter is crammed with samples, insights, and wisdom. The best feature of this book is that it goes to the key points, clearly explains them and shows how to apply them to real projects.

This book stands out in a crowded field. In an engaging non-dogmatic way, Berkun gives practical advice on a wide range of project management topics, drawing heavily on his "in the trenches" experience at microsoft.

wide-ranging, thoughtful and useful for business people as well as project managers. plus the only project management book I know that quotes niesztche!

Perhaps one of the reasons I am still doing engineering work rather than supervising it 26 years after I received my BSEE is that I could never properly wrap myself around exactly what it takes to manage a project. I therefore approached this book with a great deal of trepidation. However, after I began reading it I became pleasantly surprised. Most project management books I've read in the past intersperse advice on project management with software engineering techniques and Tony Robbins style motivational anecdotes. This one sticks to the subject and is well organized. The book is not about any one specific project management methodology, but about fundamental aspects of all projects. The author recounts his own experiences while managing projects at Microsoft to provide insight into the less transparent aspects of project management. The book is divided into three major sections: "Plans," "Skills," and "Management." This organization provides a logical flow overall and allows topics to build on one another. In spite of this logical progression, the chapters are fit for random access, as the author himself recommends. One of my favorite chapters was "Figuring Out What To Do". Here the author outlines three basic perspectives: The business perspective, the technology perspective and the customer perspective. The author states that although the customer perspective is the most important of all three that is the most neglected and is the reason that many projects fail.
The chapter "How Not To Annoy People: Process, Email, and Meeting" was another chapter I really enjoyed. It offers down-to-earth recommendations on dealing with annoying behavior which the author lists in five categories:
When others
1. assume you're an idiot.
2. don't trust you
3. waste your time
4. manage you without respect
5. make you listen to or read stupid things
Since I've been guilty of being on the giving end as well as the receiving end of some of this behavior, this chapter helped me see some of the trouble I can cause myself as well as how I can effectively deal with it when it comes from others.
However, this book is more than just about how to deal with socially backwards misanthropes such as myself. It dedicates considerable space to creativity, dealing with ideas once you have them, making ideas actionable by using affinity diagrams to consolidate ideas, and employing iterative prototyping.
The third section of the book, which is specifically about management issues, contains chapters such as "Why Leadership Is Based On Trust". In that chapter the author points out that trust is built through commitment but lost through inconsistent behavior. Leaders must develop enough trust that people will bring issues to them during crises instead of hiding them. Trust, then, is at the core of leadership. Part of the reason that people will not trust some leaders is dealt with in the chapter "Power and Politics." Specifically, the author points out that power is misused when people work towards their own self-interest. If that person is a leader, and other people take note of this misuse, trust is lost.
In summary this book has much to say about all phases of project development as well as management. Highly recommended.