This week’s selection is “Project Management for The Unofficial Project Manager” by Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore and James Wood.
Project management is something many people don’t understand, or, perhaps I should say, “don’t understand yet”.
That’s because you, and everyone else, are actually a project manager, at least some of the time. For some of us it doesn’t happen often or at big scales, but nevertheless we all have things we want to get done.
Project management is a skill; it does not happen naturally. It can be monstrously challenging to steer efforts towards the achievement of a major goal, particularly when there are plenty of disconnected parties involved.
It’s such difficult skill that entire programs have evolved around the discipline of project management, with several types of certifications available to those who study them. Many people are full-time project managers who often hold certifications in the trade.
Most readers of Fabbaloo may not be full-time project managers, as we tend to have a majority of technical folks reading our stories. However, I suspect even technical people attempt to complete work on smaller scales that could benefit from a basic understanding of the principles of project management.
This book is a short read on the subject, and it’s only 250-ish pages. It’s also not particularly expensive.
No, you won’t gain an official project management certification by reading it, but you will learn many of the basic concepts and those will most definitely assist someone attempting to get anything done. Once you understand the basic steps, you’ll wonder why you ever did things another way — and you’ll see others making obvious mistakes. Getting things done without having to repeat steps, doing things faster, and saving cash are all important.
Years ago when I was a young techie I saw project management as “the enemy”. Perhaps this was due to bossy PMs who never seemed to understand the basic technical stuff I described to them. But in reality it was I who didn’t understand the project management stuff.
Now I do, and you can too by reading this book.
Via Amazon
