Manage it! is a book by Johanna Rothman published by Pragmatic Programmers. You probably know already Pragmatic Programmers, they published Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, and also Agile Coaching by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley that my friend Fabrice Aimetti translated into French. If don’t know Pragmatic Programmers yet, I recommend a visit to their book shelf.
When I started the book, I have been surprised, badly, by the classic project management tone, and at the end, it is something I really appreciate in this book. Why ? Because it means that you can recommend this book to project managers and managers that are used to classic methodologies and classic work environments. And they will not think that you are trying to enrolled them into a sect.
Well, this book will not cover principles and values that make the culture of an organization, principles and values that can be reinforced or hustled during an agile adoption.
This book covers project management, as seen by project managers, program managers or managers, sometime as seen by team members. It covers the start of a project, the planning, life cycles, scheduling and scheduling games, estimation, creation of teams, steering, rhythm, meetings, dashboards, multisite projects, multiple projects, test integration, programs and portfolios, and of course project completion. With this short view of all the chapters, you can see what you can expect from this book. Recommendations are simple to understand, and argumentation could be useful to enrich your existing range.
I really like the way powerful questions were introduced, like :
- What does success look like ?
- Why are these results desirable ?
- What is the solution worth to you ?
- What problems does this system solve ?
- What problems could this system create ?
I appreciate also the recommendation to introduce retrospectives in the project life cycles (and the way to insit not to call this a postmortem at the end, cause we hope that nobody will die during the project).
This book can be read fast (I read it in the plane on my way back from Red Hat Tech Exchange) and I believe that it can be a useful reference when you are ready to start a new project and to work on an existing one.