Effective Project Management Traditional, Agile, Extreme Book Review

I am not a project manager but as an architect I find I am usually managing a project and the team assigned to it. More often than not, a real project manager is not available. I bought this book to find out what the latest project management best practices are. I own the 4th edition of this book and really liked it. This book starts out defining what a project is and what project management is and then it covers the PMBOK Process Groups and Knowledge areas in great detail. After that it covers different types of life cycles like Agile, Extreme, and Traditional. He then covers topics like Portfolio Management and Process Improvement. What I liked most about the book was the detail he goes into. This book contains a vast amount of information. He does a good job of providing summary overviews of what will be covered and then covering it in detail. I will admit the quantity of information can become overwhelming at times. There is a ton of it. One of the things I really like is that the author has created accompanying presentations. They are ready to use for training so your Project Support Office could use them for training across your enterprise. One of my favorite chapters was Managing Distressed Projects. It offers great insight into how projects become distressed as well as great advice on how to get your head above water again. On a decent size project I prefer to have a good project manager that I can partner with, it just makes the projects ten times more enjoyable. Mainly because I get removed from a lot of the politics. Notice I said a good project manager above. I have had my share of bad ones and they can make the project pure misery. I haven't met many project managers armed with the knowledge and the tools found in this book. I wish there were more. If you are a Project Manager, I beg you to read this book. If you are a CIO, Architect, Developer, or any other stakeholder on project large enough to have a Project manager, it would be good for you to read this book so you know what the project manager is working to accomplish during different phases of the project. All in all I think anyone involved with decent size software development project should read this book. It will definitely help improve your project's effectiveness accomplishing adding business value.

Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme