A book no business manager should miss
The Art of Project Management by ex-Microsoft team leader Scot Berkun should be read by every business manager, whether they are in IT or not.
It is a thorough manual that gets inside the guts of how to get things done within a company, how to lead and inspire a team and above all how projects start and finish. Along the way Berkun provides an insight into the workings of Microsoft, which should interest all who love ? and hate ? the company.
It is a blueprint of creativity, situational problem-solving, and the dynamics of leadership. Now I've gotten over the laudatory part, let me provide you with some of the interesting bits in this groundbreaking book, which I discovered by chance on the desk of one of the IT guys at work.
It is one of those books that you can open at random and just start reading and still get great insight into the workplace process. But you should read it from front to back to get a fuller road map of the process.
Of course, the book is geared for the IT department.
But one of the themes emphasised by Berkun is the inter-disciplinary process in project management.
Maybe you are not involved directly in a project, or are one of the workers doing the grunt labour. Just the simple setting out of how to prioritise tasks and make lists is useful at work and I would venture to say, in life. There are many metaphors to be extracted from this book.
One of my favourite passages (mainly because it describes situations I have seen so often both in IT departments and elsewhere) is Berkun's description of the 'hero complex' in his chapter on "What to do when things go wrong".
The "hero complex" describes the person who compulsively creates dangerous situations simply so he can resolve them and look like the saviour of a company, at least in the eyes of his supervisors or those higher up the food chain.
"In the minor form, it's simply someone who likes working in risky situations and surviving them," Berkun writes. "In the major form, a person with a hero complex may be putting the project at risk, or even trying to sabotage it." The complex most commonly develops in those who start their careers in start-ups or very small and volatile firms. Some manifestations include those who believe that project planning is unnecessary because that is they way they have always worked. The other manifestation is the cowboy who believes he or she works for themselves to the exclusion of the project or company's goals. The hero simply likes being a hero.
Common symptoms are destructive competition with peers or indifference to the work of others.
As Berkun describes this type: "'Didn't I rescue the cute, fuzzy animals getting burned when I ran into the building to save them?' 'Yes, but you also set the fire.'"
In the end, most of the situations that create the hero complex can be pinned on a failure of management.
"An entire codependency culture is created, which depends on heroes and rewards both the creation of risks and their resolution," he writes.
Recognise any situations you may be in or were in? On a more positive note, one of Berkun's earliest chapters describes a method of developing schedules for a project. He describes a common personality trait of humans to be late (very true for myself and something I do battle with everyday). Yet this tendency ends up causing a lot of unnecessary frustration and in the end can damage a business if it can't deliver to clients when promised.
"As human beings, most of us arrive at the task of scheduling projects with a questionable track record for delivering or receiving things on time," Berkun writes.
In a group situation then the strategy is to set a realistic and clear schedule that commits everyone to a time line for when things will be done.
Simple, and we supposedly all know the value of schedules. But do we really know how to make one.
After all, it is not a task that is taught at high school or by our parents, although it should be.
Berkun's apt drawings and schema really set out the process of drawing up a schedule of work that makes it clear what is involved. For the IT crowd, read the section in this very important chapter on "Software planning demystified".