Whether
your projects and teams are Agile, apathetic, or just plain asleep, Johanna Rothman's
Manage It! is your pragmatic,
no-nonsense guide to deftly dealing with management reality when your project's
stakeholders are clinging to project fantasy. This is yet another top notch
book from both Johanna Rothman and the Pragmatic Programmer's Bookshelf. Rothman's
previous books Behind Closed
Doors: Secrets of Great Management
(with Esther Derby), and Hiring the
Best Knowledge Workers, Techies, and Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People have both
received critical acclaim, and Rothman's
blogs have been on my regular
reading list for years. So this new, insightful, practical, and timely tome
from her on the subject of modern project management success in the real world
(both Agile and otherwise) comes as no surprise.
Several
things become obvious within minutes of when you first start reading the book:
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.
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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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Whether
your projects and teams are Agile, apathetic, or just plain asleep, Johanna Rothman's
