• The author is clear and to the point!
• This book isn't exclusively about Agile management, it's about doing what works.
• The author is not just a seasoned pro, but a true master of her project management craft, with an incredible depth and breadth of "in the trenches" expertise across an innumerably diverse mix of projects.

The book covers all the key aspects of a project: initiation, planning, life-cycle selection, scheduling, estimation, steering, cadence, meetings, visibility, completion, etc. It also has chapters on integration and test, program management, multi-site management, project-dashboards, and managing project portfolios.
 

{sidebar id=1}Each section of each chapter is titled after an essential practice, guideline, or piece of advice, such that the table of contents practically reads like a step-by-step checklist of walking through a real project. Each section in the book explains why the step is important, several contexts and approaches for tackling it, and stories of real-life experience to support it.
Chapters six to 11 are the meat of the book, or at least are the ones that resonated most deeply with my experience. The chapter devoted to Recognizing and Avoiding Schedule Games is possibly worth the price of the book alone. Then it is followed up by equally impressive (and incisive) chapters on Creating a Great Project Team, Steering the Project, Maintaining Project Rhythm, Managing Meetings, and Creating and Using a Project Dashboard. Agile aficionados will be pleased to see that along the way, she covers many agile concepts such as time-boxing, iterations, retrospectives, continuous integration, and test-driven development.

The book has an awareness of Agile as well as other approaches, and even has a separate section devoted to lifecycle selection and the various issues involved in such decisions. Like I said earlier, this isn't a book exclusively about Agile project management! It is about reality-based pragmatic project management, for which Agile happens to have a lot to offer, but there are countless other gems of advice too that don't require taking "the Agile pill" in order to apply them.

If a budding project manager came to me, with knowledge of text-book project management concepts and project management tools, and asked me "what one book would you recommend to help me swiftly bridge the gap from theory into modern-practice that would most increase my chances of succeeding" I'd be hard pressed to find another book that I'd recommend more highly than Manage It!

About the Reviewer
Brad Appleton is an enterprise SCM/ALM solution architect for a Fortune 100 technology company. Currently he helps projects and teams adopt and apply agile development & SCM practices. Brad also author's the Agile CM Environments blog, and is co-author of Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration, the "Agile SCM" column in CMCrossroads.com's CM Journal, and is a former section editor for The C++ Report. Since 1987, Brad has extensive experience using, developing, and supporting SCM environments for teams of all shapes and sizes. He holds an M.S. in Software Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics.

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