Wandering through Projects

PM Book List

Here is a list of good project management books which is very helpful to understand the basic concepts and enter in to the project management arena. The list is compiled in order of the edition’s publishing date.

The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management by Tom DeMacro
This book set in the form of a novel. The author, in a fascinating way laid out all the typical mistakes of project management, and shows the methods and solutions.
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMacro, Timothy Lister
This book shows why the human aspects of project management are usually more difficult to manage than technology. It presents good recommendations for effectively managing IT projects and teams.

The One-Page Project Manager: Communicate and Manage Any Project With a Single Sheet of Paper by Clark A. Campbell
This is an excellent book on the communication aspect of project management. It is a must read for every manager who wants to improve the project communication effectively and efficiently.

Project Management in the Real World by Elizabeth Harrin
This is completely a practical guide to project management. It contains real world examples, tips, and case studies.

Absolute Beginner's Guide to Project Management by Greg Horine
This book sets an excellent foundation to project management and a good reference for fresh project managers to understand the every aspects of PMBOK process.

The Lazy Project Manager: How to be twice as productive and still leave the office early by Peter Taylor
This book demonstrates the techniques that can be used to work smarter than work harder. This is a simple as well as an important read about project management practices.

Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme by Robert K. Wysocki
This book gives an overview of all project management approaches that practice today. It’s a good reference for people who want to learn the basis of project management.

The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management by Eric Verzuh
This book covers all the aspects of project management with industrial exposure, free digital templates, and PMP exam prep.

Agile Project Management Book List

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Reading helps us to learn about theories, best practices, and techniques which are useful to maintain the expert status. Here is a list of books which is very helpful to learn about Agile Project Management. The list is compiled in order of the edition’s publishing date.

Agile Software Development with Scrum by Ken Schwaber, Mike Beedle
Agile Software Development with Scrum shows the philosophy behind Scrum and it is a great introduction to Scrum. This is a good book for beginners.

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck
This is an excellent book for understanding basic lean concepts and the overview of lean in relation to software development.

Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide by Craig Larman
This is a good introduction to agile and iterative development. It includes detailed explanation of four major methodologies; Scrum, XP, RUP and Evo.

Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
This contains a series of case studies to explain how to use Scrum by showing different situations and cases of success and failure.

Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn
This is an excellent book to learn about planning, estimation, feature and schedule management aspects of agile.

Manage It!: Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management by Johanna Rothman
A great read on difficulties and pitfalls of project management. It is full of good advices and good practices.

The Software Project manager's Bridge to Agility by Michele Sliger, Stacia Broderick
This book shows how agile management practices fit in to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK).

Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum by Craig Larman, Bas Vodde
This is a guide for agile practitioners to expand from small development teams to large teams.

Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products by Jim Highsmith
This book explains software development best practices with theories that a project manager can use in agile projects.

Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn
Succeeding with Agile is one of the best books about the practice of implementing Scrum in your work place. This is an excellent book for beginners and a recommended text book for CSMs.

Learning with Social Networks

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Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter have become a vital part of life. We wander through these sites at least once a day. Some people say it’s a waste of time while others say it’s a very useful way to be in touch with their colleagues, families, and friends, and be up-to-date with the industry.

Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and other Q&A websites such as StackOverflow provides a vast knowledge on practical aspects as well as best practices of project management and other streams. If you are a PM enthusiast, here are some suggestions to get involve and be up-to-date with the industry.

Twitter

Since you can filter information through hashtags on Twitter it is easy to keep a track and monitor the conversations. Here are some useful hashtags to monitor project management,

#pm
#pmot
#projectmanagement
#pmi
#agile
#scrum
#kanban
#PMChat

LinkedIn

There are lots of professional groups in LinkedIn that you can join, have some conversations, and be in touch with the professionals. Here are some project management related groups that you might be interested to join,

The Project Manager Network - #1 Group for Project Managers
Agile and Lean Software Development
Agile
Agile Project Management
Career In Project Management
Project Management Professionals PMP
Scrum Practitioners

Blogs

There are lots of project management related blogs that share industry experiences and best practices. You can read blog posts and if you have any questions or have different views you can comment and share your knowledge. You can add blogs to your Google Reader, organize your favorite blogs by category and be updated whenever a new blog post has been published. There are lots of favorite blogs of mine; I will mention some of them here for you to check out,

#PMChat
Better Projects
Change Through Action
Gantthead
Girls Guide to Project Management
Guerrilla Project Management
Herding Cats
Papercut PM
Pawel Brodzinski on Software Project Management
Personal Kanban
PMHut
pmStudent
Project Shrink
Stepping into Project Management
Succeeding with Agile - Mike Cohn's Blog
The Critical Path By Derek Huether
Yuval Yeret’s Blog

Q&A websites

There are some Q&A sites that can post any question you want to get answered as well as you can answer some questions that you might know the answer. This is very useful when you can’t find any answers or you are confused with some questions. Here are some Q&A websites that you might be interested,

Quora
Stack Exchange: Project Management

Facebook

Project Management Institute has a very active page on Facebook with over 81,000 likes. You can also like the page and get updated with news, articles and comment on anything and share your thoughts.

Google Alerts

If you want to be up-to-date with the industry regularly or don’t want to miss any news in the industry, one of the best and easy ways to be updated is via Google Alert.

There are more online resources which you can be in touch with the industry. Whenever you read an article, tweet, or question; if you have any views or you know some better answers or you have a question, remember to leave a comment. So, you can socially interact with other professionals and gain more knowledge.

Photo Credits http://www.mergesocialmedia.com/

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

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I finished reading the book Personal Kanban: Maping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. I’ve been practicing Personal Kanban for some time and this book gave me some more insights to improve my practice.

It gave me a better idea on personalizing Kanban board for different tasks by setting up different flows. I used to practice the basic flow of To-do, WIP and Done. The book explains how to set up further different flows. When I am studying, I have to do some research and collect notes for subjects; have to study, have to make short notes and have to review them. Rather than including all these tasks in WIP flow, I can set up different flows for these different tasks and add more clarity to my Personal Kanban system.

There are two rules that are very important in Personal Kanban; visualize your work, limit your work-in-progress. Throughout the book, Jim Benson and Tonianne Barry demonstrate the importance of these two rules and how to practice them. Even though Personal Kanban system has two rules, it is a very flexible system which can easily adaptable for changing environments.

The first chapter of the book explains rules, how they work and why Personal Kanban is needed. The next chapter explains how to create a Personal Kanban system for your work. The rest of the book explains the prioritization, time management, and how these things help to increase effectiveness.

Personal Kanban: Maping Work | Navigating Life was an easy read with lots of examples, cartoons, pictures, diagrams and clear explanations. The authors’ simple and forthright narrative style kept me out from getting bored on theories and principles. If you already know Kanban or practice Personal Kanban this book might not bring much new ideas. However, there are still good tips and explanations that make it worth the read.

“Personal Kanban is a simple, elegant mechanism that produces dramatic results. It helps us manage ourselves, but also lets us share our work, our goals, and our epiphanies with others. It’s a visual launched to personal effectiveness, spontaneous collaboration, and an integrated life. It’s low maintenance, but high yield. No crystals, no aromatherapy; just you, your work, and better planning.” - Personal Kanban: Maping Work | Navigating Life

Personal Kanban at Home

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When I first heard about Kanban, it really got my attention. Later, when I was reading on this topic I came across the term “Personal Kanban”. I was inspired by how people use it to organize their day-to-day life. So, I decided to have my own Personal Kanban board for my studies.

Timetable schedule, mind maps, text books

I used to study with a timetable before I started my Kanban study board. At that time I had no idea about how many topics I have completed and how many more topics remaining. Hence, I always had lots of stress and sometimes, rather than concentrating on the notes, I used to think about the work load.

I started my Kanban board with the basic terms of Personal Kanban by dividing my board (it’s my door since I didn’t have a white board) into three separate parts namely: To-Do, Work in progress, and Done. I took my timetable, sticky notes, and all the study materials and started to give a weight for each topic with a priority based on the subjects I had to complete. I used large sticky notes with three different colors for different subjects. For each topic on a subject, I used small sticky notes with different colors according to “Easy”, “Should read more”, and “difficult”.

When I was using Kanban study board, the first thought came in to my mind was, “now I can see all my work anytime and I can keep a track of my progress”. It helped me to be aware of;

what I have done?
how long it took me to complete a particular topic?
how many more topics I have to cover?
how long it will take to cover a particular subject?
what are the difficulties I had and might have?

This helped me to reduce my stress and increase productive time effectively more than the previous approach I have been practicing. Also, practicing Personal Kanban was very entertaining. Once I finished a task and moved to “Done” column, I felt relieved. At the same time, it was exciting to start a topic and finish it before the estimated time. This really helped me to cover the whole syllabus with a huge motivation under minimum stress.