Volume X - Issue I - January 2008
PM Book Reviews
Book Title: The Rise of the Project Workforce Introduction to the Book The book gives a comprehensive review of project management principles and best practices with an emphasis on integrated workforce management. Its purpose is to provide the tools to ensure an organization’s success in adapting to a faster, cheaper, flat-world business environment. The author, Rudolf Melik, is cofounder and CEO of Tenrox which is an international software company with clients in more than fifty countries. His areas of expertise are in project and workforce management, regulatory compliance and business process automation. I was drawn to the book because of its sub-topic: Managing People and Projects in a Flat World. As a project management professional, I have been increasingly challenged by projects that span multiple countries and cultures, and organizations that are continuously flattened, and am interested in how others are successfully overcoming these challenges.
Book Title:Unearthing Business requirements:
Introduction to the Book Failure to effectively elicit concise requirements and the resultant ineffective systems requirements determination has been a critical problem in the delivery and success of information systems. Project Managers and Business Researchers have identified this problem to the lack of clear communications between systems designers and end-users. Traditional interviewing methods have been the norm for many organizations, but in the last few years several facilitated group techniques have been employed and these approaches have generally outperformed the traditional interviewing methods. These techniques, employed in initial group meetings, bring together system developers, end-users, and managers and are typically conducted with freely interacting group techniques. Unfortunately, these techniques are also prone to some of the classical relational problems and make successful outcomes critically reliant on excellent facilitation. The cost of fixing a requirements defect later in the development stage is much higher than the cost of identifying and fixing it in the early stages of development. In order to do this, the system requirements must be properly identified, analyzed and reviewed early in the development process. Rosemary Hossenlopp & Kathleen B. Hass’s book ‘Unearthing Business requirements: Elicitation Tools and Techniques’ tackles this vital area and details a process that primarily focuses on discovering, analyzing, documenting and managing system requirements.
Book Title:Advancing Organizational Project
Introduction to the Book Five of the book’s seven authors carry a PMP certification and are employees by PM Solutions. The other 2 are employees of the publisher. All together, they bring in a wealth of knowledge in discussing organizational project management maturity. The purpose of the book is to discuss how a project management maturity model is applied and explore related topics of organizational structure and project manager development while providing case studies and statistical analyses. Being part of the a newly established project management process at my workplace, I wanted to read up on project management maturity beyond PMI’s OPM3 model to find some results, both good and bad, of other companies who have established formal project management practices and how their models affected their successes or failures. Ultimately, I wanted to share my findings with the project manager user group committee in which I serve in how we can mature our project management maturity- not everyone in our company has had formal project manager training and I wanted to read up on it s benefits, if any, in maturing project management in an company.
Book Title: Project Management Essentials
Introduction to the Book I myself being a student of project management found this book brief, concise, and yet encompassing the essentials of the project management. The authors - William P. Athayde, Deborah Bigelow Crawford, Ruth Elswick, and Paul Lomard are senior faulty members of PM College and they surely have understood the learning curve involved in knowing the intricacies of Project Management. Hence, they have utilized their business, project management, and academic experiences to put forward this book with simple chapters, relevant points, and important concepts for the students of Project Management. The main purpose of this book is to provide basic understanding of various project management processes and knowledge areas and build a solid foundation to become a successful project manager. There are many reasons why I choose to write a review on this book. One of the main reasons is, when I first started to read PMI PMBOK® Guide I wished I had access to a book which can give me a brief broader view of concepts in Project Management before I can delve into all the details of process ITTOs (Inputs, Tools & Techniques and Outputs). Once I found this book, I thought this can aid other students to overcome the difficulties which I went through before making a sense out of PMBOK® Guide.
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