 |
|||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
||||||
 |
 |
|||||
|
Reviewer: DavidWinders@globalspirit.net from Basingstoke Hampshire One of the striking qualities of this book is its presentation, it is one of those nice books to have. From its tactile pleasing cover to its easy to read lay out with clear headings and quality diagrams it leaps out from the book shelf with a buy me attitude. So many good business books fail with tiny myopic small print and "ants with inky legs" diagrams; this is one scores high in presentation. So many project management textbooks focus on project management technical skills rather than conceptually what needs to be done. You can do the maths to forward and back compute PERT charts to your hearts content but equally fail to deliver any business benefits. However clever you are with PMW, MS Project or any other priesthood tool failure to deliver value from your project is the easiest thing to do as the IS industry fails to learn year in year out. This book tackles this head on as Robert comes across as a commercial chap with clear focus of why we do projects which is to deliver benefits. He does not get hung up on project management for its own sake; as so many people do as they try to self justify their professional ego's using and mystic terms and language. This book is about what project management is about not the technical project management skills and therefore it appeals to business people who what to run business changes within a project framework. It is useful for those who want to understand what project management is about, the controls and deliverables, it really achieves this well and gets to the point quickly and effectively. This book is real world project management tool where the approach makes sense and does not put off the "non specialist project person" with bureaucracy and impractical ideology. So many firms loose out on not using project management because the gantt chart jockey's bore them to tears. If you are thinking of getting in a project management methodology to run a big change initiative and paying consultants a fortune to re invent the wheel then this book will save you thousands. It explains a structured approach in perhaps the best way I have seen and gets to the point much faster than 100's of pages of PRINCE2 manuals. So much literature looks at the minutia of project management activity promoting forms and charts and lets the reader become immersed in material that eventually makes him forget what its all about "delivering the benefits" . A lot of IS so called professional project managers could learn a lot form this book, let Robert get you away from low level Gantt charts and back into the real world of commercial delivery. The CD ROM is useful although the work outs never seem to fit exactly to what you want to do and although nice I am not 100% sure that its that helpful and if it puts the price of the book up that is a shame. The only criticism is that it fails to tackle pre project work well and is not really a book on change management. I found the programme management section much weaker than the project section although this is common as project management is the easier discipline. This is definitely a book on the practical theory of project management rather than a book on change management, if your looking for that I would buy something else. This is not a cheap book but then it is well put together. If trying to decided which book on project management to buy then you can't go wrong with this one. I liked it and it takes a prime position on my shelf. |
||||||
