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Recommended Project Management books

You don't have enough time to learn everything from personal experience. Reading good books expands your horizons. Books allow you to step outside your organization. Books can bring you up to speed quickly on a subject. You can extract a lot of good ideas from a book. Experts clarify their thinking by writing and teaching. You gain from this clarity. Here's a list of recommended books on:

No one book covers all of project management in an organized fashion. Browse through these books in a bookstore to find one that suits your style.

Project Management
Book Title Author Date Publisher Contents
Critical Chain Eliyaha Goldratt 1997 Connected to the theory of constraints. Offers better approach to managing projects than Critical Path Scheduling.
Project Management - 6th edition Dennis Lock 1996 Wiley Covers Project Management process from initial appraisal to closedown.
Project Management William Pinkerton 2003 McGraw Hill Achieving Project Bottom-Line Succe$$
Project Management 8th edition Howard Kerzner 2003 A systems approach to Planning, Scheduling and Controlling.
Visualizing Project Management Kevin Forsberg 2000 Wiley A model for business and technical success
PMBOK PMI 2000 PMI Project Management Body of Knowledge. Outlines some of the key resposibilities of a project manager including: plan development, scope management, time management, cost management, quality management, human resource management, communications management, risk management and procurement management.

Improve your success with the PMP exam by rehearsing lots of questions with one of the following books

PMI Exam Preparation books
Book Title Author Date Publisher Contents
Project Management Professional Study Guide Joseph Phillips 2004 McGraw Hill Osborne Contains 700 plus practice exam questions. 
PMP Project Management Professional Study Guide Kim Heldman, PMP 2002 Sybex Includes CD with practice exams and book in electronic format.
Exam Cram 2 David Francis
Greg Horine 		2004 Que 320 pages

Project managers must build their team to complete the project.

Team Building
Book Title Author Date & Publisher Contents
Wisdom of Teams John Katzenbach 1994, Harvard Business School press Creating the high-performance organization
The Discipline of teams: A Mindbook John Katzenbach 2001 Workbook for Delivering small group performance.
Trust Francis Fukuyama 1995, Penquin Books Includes a comparison of the social dynamics of various societies in building trust between individuals. High trust societies include: US, Germany and Japan. Lower trust societies where family connections play a much larger role include: China, Italy, France and Korea.
Team Software Process Watts Humphrey 2000, Addison Wesley part of SEI series in Software Engineering. Contents many tips for documenting
Building High Performance Teams Brian Mullen UBC course Session 6 in UBC Project Management with Microsoft Project course.

Project methodologies identify alternatives for tackling projects. Project managers should familiarize themselves with methodologies relevant to their project type. A methodology may cover the complete project life cycle or only a portion of the life cycle.

Software Project Management Methodologies
Book Title Author Date Publisher Contents
Rapid Development Steve McConnell 1996 Microsoft Press Taming Wild Software Schedules. Reviews about twenty-five best practices in the software industry.
Implementing the IEEE Software Engineering Standards Michael Schmidt 2003 Recognized by the Software Engineering Standards Committee of the IEEE computer society as a useful guide for software practitioners applying software engineering standards.
Software Assessments, Benchmarks and best practices Capers Jones 2000 Addison Wesley Combine assessments and benchmarking for optimal software analysis. Identify best practices for software development. Improve software quality. Reduce costs of software maintenance by avoiding software errors.
Software Project Management - A Unified Framework Walker Royce 1996 Addison-Wesley Covers software delevelopment using the Unified Framework for Object based software. Highly recommended.
The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit Ralph Kimball, Laura Reeves, Margy Ross & Warren Thornthwaite Wiley Expert Methods for Designing, Developing and Deploying Data Warehouses. Lots of detailed task description even if you never build a data warehouse.

Estimating project duration, work effort and cost challenges even experienced project managers. You need a knowledge of sizing metrics to compare your project with others and estimating metrics that measure team performance in producing different deliverables.

Estimating Effort and Cost
Book Title Author Date Contents
Applied Software Measurement, 2nd edition Capers Jones 1997, McGraw Hill Assuring Productivity and Quality. This book based on the function point method of estimating contains many useful methods, conclusions and tables. Every IT manager responsible for projects should read this book.
Software Measurement Dick Simmons, Newton Ellis, Hiroko Fujihara, Way Huo 1998 A visualization toolkit for Project control and Process Improvement
Project Estimating and Cost Management Parviz Rad 2001
Function Point Analysis David Garmus
David Herron 		2001 Measurement Practices for Successful Software Projects.
Estimating Effort and Cost Brian Mullen UBC course Session 5 in UBC Project Management with Microsoft Project course.

Requirements form the foundation of systems development. Documented requirements facilitate  change control to manage scope creep.

Requirements Definition
Book Title Author Date & Publisher Contents
A Requirements Pattern Patricia Ferdinandi 2002, Addison-Wesley Requirements Engineering for Internet products
The Unified Process - Inception Phase Scott Ambler and Larry Constantine 2000, CMP The inception phase delivers a vision document, initial requirements, initial project glossary, a business case, domain models, business models, a development case and an architecture prototype.
The Unified Process - Elaboration Phase Scott Ambler 2000, CMP The Elaboration phase delivers a solid understanding of the requirements, architecture baseline, Best practices in implementing the Unified Process. A collection of articles from leading authors.
Object Oriented Software Engineering - A Used Case driven approach Ivor Jacobson 1992, ACM Press Inventor of Use Cases which represent a major breakthrough in a framework for defining user requirements.

Business Process Improvement should be undertaken prior to major systems development.

Business Process Improvement methodologies
Book Title Author Date & Publisher Contents
Reengineering Handbook Raymond Manganelli & Mark Klein 1994, AMACOM A step-by-step guide to business transformation. Very detailed until you get to the point of where the magic new methods are discovered. A more detailed book for discovering innovative solutions is Breakthrough thinking
Business Process Improvement James Harrington MacGraw Hill, 1991 The breakthrough strategy for total quality, productivity and competitiveness.
Process Innovation Thomas Davenport, Ernst & Young, Center for Information Technology and Strategy 1993, Harvard Business School Press Reengineering Work through information tectnology.

Project Managers use project software to prepare project plans, estimate project duration, communicate task assignments to project resources, track project progress and communicate to clients and management. Microsoft Project is the leading project management software being adopted by many organizations.

Microsoft Project
Book Title Author Date & Publisher Contents
Microsoft Project version 2003 Inside/Out Teresa Stover 2003. Microsoft Press  
Using Microsoft Project version 2003 Tim Pyron 2002, QUE The most comprehensive book on using Microsoft Project and Project Server.
Microsoft Project 2002 Bible Elaine Marmel 2002, Wiley Publishing The most comprehensive book on using Microsoft Project and Project Server.

Project Managers need to foster innovation and creative solutions to challenges that confront project teams. The following books provide successful methods and tools to generate creative solutions and overcome challenges to deliver project results.

Creativity and Thinking
Book Title Author Date & Publisher Contents
Breakthrough Thinking Gerald Nadler & Shozo Hibino 1994, Prima Seven principles of creative problem solving. The goal hierarchy is a key method to understand challenges from a broader perspective and generate a wide range of creative solutions to challenges.
Six Thinking Hats Edward de Bono 1990, Penguin Books A classic that covers blue hat (facilitator), white hat (facts), green hat (creative), yellow hat (elaboration), black hat (negative = risks) and red-hat (emotional and values)thinking.
The Artist's Way at Work Mark Bryan & Julia Cameron 1998, Morrow Twelve weeks to creative freedom. Includes the concept of writing a daily journal for 30 minutes at the start of each day to get organized and discover hidden ideas that you have been incubating in your mind overnight. A key skill for project managers help improve their performance.

Last updated: March 11, 2007

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