Scott Berkun

Excellent book. My main complaint, if you can call it that, was that as an overview, it could only give a taste of the topics covered. Fortunately, Berkun sprinkled follow-up references liberally throughout.

This book focuses on the essence of project management: allowing a group of people to work together to accomplish some goal. It's not tied to any particular technique or methodology. Because it's so general, some individual ideas and recommendations come across as common sense. The value comes from how the ideas support each other. E.g., the notion that schedules are highly uncertain at the beginning and become more certain over time is common sense, but when that is combined with approaches for developing specifications or making decisions or managing risk, it becomes a powerful foundation for running a project.

I don't know how useful this book would be for someone trained as a project manager, but for someone like myself, who has had to pick up project management because someone has to do it, it's a great transition from intuition to a reasoned approach.… (mere)