Summer of books

Book review: Conflict 101

August 29, 2012

Who doesn’t have to deal with conflict at work? Conflict 101: A Manager’s Guide to Resolving Problems so Everyone Can Get Back to Work is the handbook you need to address causes of conflict on projects. Susan H. Shearouse covers everything from why we are bad at dealing with conflict at the office, how the [...]

Book review: Second Order Project Management

August 27, 2012

I found it hard to get my head around Second Order Project Management, a book by Michael Cavanagh. Even now, I don’t really know what he is advocating, although it seems to be a new way of describing techniques I think we should all be using anyway. Cavanagh describes second order project management like this: [...]

Book review: Everything is a Project

August 24, 2012

“Projects are the mechanism we use to move our departments forward one step at a time,” writes Ben Snyder, CEO of Systemation, in his book, Everything is a Project. He continues: “Projects are what we use to execute our initiatives in chunks, make our products better, organise our efforts, and turn ‘what could be’ into [...]

Book review: Results Without Authority

August 22, 2012

Project team members are like library books. They are expert in a particular area, but you only have them on loan and you have to give them back when someone else says so. How do you keep a project team going in that situation? Results Without Authority: Controlling a Project When the Team Doesn’t Report [...]

Being professional: Book review of The Professional

August 17, 2012

In The Professional: Defining the New Standard of Excellence at Work, Subroto Bagchi aims to answer the question: what makes a professional? There has been an explosion in the world of professions, and yet there is still no system in place that can train people how to be true professionals. No matter how much education [...]

Book review: Value Management: Translating Aspirations into Performance

August 15, 2012

Value Management: Translating Aspirations into Performance is a new book by Roger H. Davies and Adam J. Davies (Gower, 2011). It’s heavy going, but if you are into getting the best value out of the change programmes you are delivering, then it makes useful reading. There is a fair amount of theory, but there are [...]

Book review: The Wealthy Freelancer

August 13, 2012

The Wealthy Freelancer: 12 Secrets to a Great Income and an Enviable Lifestyle by Steve Slaunwhite, Pete Savage and Ed Gandia doesn’t sound much like a project management book, but I know that many of you run your own project management consultancy or training firms – or have aspirations to do so. It also contains [...]

Book review: Math for GrownUps

August 8, 2012

Math (or maths, as we’d call it over here) is essential to managing projects. You need to know how to construct a budget, use the data from time-tracking software and calculate lag and lead times for project tasks. And don’t get me started on Earned Value. But many of us find math tricky. Laura Laing, [...]

Book review: Tame, Messy and Wicked Risk Leadership

August 6, 2012

Things are always going wrong. No matter how hard we try to keep everything under control, something will always happen to mess up our hard work. Now I’ve read David Hancock’s book, Tame, Messy and Wicked Risk Leadership, I wonder if I shouldn’t be blaming everyone else for messing up, but myself. Hancock presents the [...]

Book review: Growth or Bust: Proven Turnaround Strategies to Grow Your Business

August 3, 2012

Growth or Bust might seem like a strange title to review from a project management perspective. Some of you may well have your own companies or work in roles where you contribute to organisational strategy. But for the ‘average’ project manager (if there is such a thing) turnaround business strategies are not key to getting [...]

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