Scale Your Project Management Efforts to Maximize Success! One size does not fit all in project management. Selecting an approach that is appropriate for the size and complexity of a project is essential to achieving success. Over-managing a small project can bog it down in bureaucracy, while a laid-back approach can lead to disaster on a complex project. Pragmatic Project Management: Five Scalable Steps to Success will help you select the methodologies and tools that will enable you to expend minimum effort to achieve maximum gain on your project. This clearly written guide lays the groundwork with a chapter on project sizing and management scaling and follows with chapters on each of the five essential elements of pragmatic project management: • The project charter • The project team • The project plan • Project issue management • Project status tracking and reporting Practical tips and a checklist are included at the end of each chapter. Use the checklists as you plan and execute your project to keep it on track and to scale.
You have too many projects, and firefighting and multitasking are keeping you from finishing any of them. You need to manage your project portfolio. This fully updated and expanded bestseller arms you with agile and lean ways to collect all your work and decide which projects you should do first, second, and never. See how to tie your work to your organization's mission and show your managers, your board, and your staff what you can accomplish and when. Picture the work you have, and make those difficult decisions, ensuring that all your strength is focused where it needs to be. All your projects and programs make up your portfolio. But how much time do you actually spend on your projects, and how much time do you spend on emergency fire drills or waste through multitasking? This book gives you insightful ways to rank all the projects you're working on and figure out the right staffing and schedule so projects get finished faster. The trick is adopting lean and agile approaches to projects, whether they're software projects, projects that include hardware, or projects that depend on chunks of functionality from other suppliers. Find out how to define the mission of your team, group, or department, with none of the buzzwords that normally accompany a mission statement. Armed with the work and the mission, you'll manage your portfolio better and make those decisions that define the true leaders in the organization. With this expanded second edition, discover how to scale project portfolio management from one team to the entire enterprise, and integrate Cost of Delay when ranking projects. Additional Kanban views provide even more ways to visualize your portfolio.
Forget wizards, you need a slave--someone to do your repetitive, tedious and boring tasks, without complaint and without pay, so you'll have more time to design and write exciting code. Indeed, that's what computers are for. You can enlist your own computer to automate all of your project's repetitive tasks, ranging from individual builds and running unit tests through to full product release, customer deployment, and monitoring the system. Many teams try to do these tasks by hand. That's usually a really bad idea: people just aren't as good at repetitive tasks as machines. You run the risk of doing it differently the one time it matters, on one machine but not another, or doing it just plain wrong. But the computer can do these tasks for you the same way, time after time, without bothering you. You can transform these labor-intensive, boring and potentially risky chores into automatic, background processes that just work. In this eagerly anticipated book, you'll find a variety of popular, open-source tools to help automate your project. With this book, you will learn: How to make your build processes accurate, reliable, fast, and easy. How to build complex systems at the touch of a button. How to build, test, and release software automatically, with no human intervention. Technologies and tools available for automation: which to use and when. Tricks and tips from the masters (do you know how to have your cell phone tell you that your build just failed?) You'll find easy-to-implement recipes to automate your Java project, using the same popular style as the rest of our Jolt Productivity Award-winning Starter Kit books. Armed with plenty of examples andconcrete, pragmatic advice, you'll find it's easy to get started and reap the benefits of modern software development. You can begin to enjoy pragmatic, automatic, unattended software production that's reliable and accurate every time.
Software startups make global headlines every day. As technology companies succeed and grow, so do their engineering departments. In your career, you'll may suddenly get the opportunity to lead teams: to become a manager. But this is often uncharted territory. How can you decide whether this career move is right for you? And if you do, what do you need to learn to succeed? Where do you start? How do you know that you're doing it right? What does "it" even mean? And isn't management a dirty word? This book will share the secrets you need to know to manage engineers successfully. Going from engineer to manager doesn't have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You'll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. Start with your transition to being a manager and see how that compares to being an engineer. Learn how to better organize information, feel productive, and delegate, but not micromanage. Discover how to manage your own boss, hire and fire, do performance and salary reviews, and build a great team. You'll also learn the psychology: how to ship while keeping staff happy, coach and mentor, deal with deadline pressure, handle sensitive information, and navigate workplace politics. Consider your whole department. How can you work with other teams to ensure best practice? How do you help form guilds and committees and communicate effectively? How can you create career tracks for individual contributors and managers? How can you support flexible and remote working? How can you improve diversity in the industry through your own actions? This book will show you how. Great managers can make the world a better place. Join us.
What others in the trenches say about The Pragmatic Programmer... “The cool thing about this book is that it’s great for keeping the programming process fresh. The book helps you to continue to grow and clearly comes from people who have been there.” — Kent Beck, author of Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change “I found this book to be a great mix of solid advice and wonderful analogies!” — Martin Fowler, author of Refactoring and UML Distilled “I would buy a copy, read it twice, then tell all my colleagues to run out and grab a copy. This is a book I would never loan because I would worry about it being lost.” — Kevin Ruland, Management Science, MSG-Logistics “The wisdom and practical experience of the authors is obvious. The topics presented are relevant and useful.... By far its greatest strength for me has been the outstanding analogies—tracer bullets, broken windows, and the fabulous helicopter-based explanation of the need for orthogonality, especially in a crisis situation. I have little doubt that this book will eventually become an excellent source of useful information for journeymen programmers and expert mentors alike.” — John Lakos, author of Large-Scale C++ Software Design “This is the sort of book I will buy a dozen copies of when it comes out so I can give it to my clients.” — Eric Vought, Software Engineer “Most modern books on software development fail to cover the basics of what makes a great software developer, instead spending their time on syntax or technology where in reality the greatest leverage possible for any software team is in having talented developers who really know their craft well. An excellent book.” — Pete McBreen, Independent Consultant “Since reading this book, I have implemented many of the practical suggestions and tips it contains. Across the board, they have saved my company time and money while helping me get my job done quicker! This should be a desktop reference for everyone who works with code for a living.” — Jared Richardson, Senior Software Developer, iRenaissance, Inc. “I would like to see this issued to every new employee at my company....” — Chris Cleeland, Senior Software Engineer, Object Computing, Inc. “If I’m putting together a project, it’s the authors of this book that I want. . . . And failing that I’d settle for people who’ve read their book.” — Ward Cunningham Straight from the programming trenches, The Pragmatic Programmer cuts through the increasing specialization and technicalities of modern software development to examine the core process--taking a requirement and producing working, maintainable code that delights its users. It covers topics ranging from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse. Read this book, and you'll learn how to Fight software rot; Avoid the trap of duplicating knowledge; Write flexible, dynamic, and adaptable code; Avoid programming by coincidence; Bullet-proof your code with contracts, assertions, and exceptions; Capture real requirements; Test ruthlessly and effectively; Delight your users; Build teams of pragmatic programmers; and Make your developments more precise with automation. Written as a series of self-contained sections and filled with entertaining anecdotes, thoughtful examples, and interesting analogies, The Pragmatic Programmer illustrates the best practices and major pitfalls of many different aspects of software development. Whether you're a new coder, an experienced programmer, or a manager responsible for software projects, use these lessons daily, and you'll quickly see improvements in personal productivity, accuracy, and job satisfaction. You'll learn skills and develop habits and attitudes that form the foundation for long-term success in your career. You'll become a Pragmatic Programmer.
This book is intended for practitioners, students, and researchers who are interested in designing, using, assessing, and researching performance management systems. Managerial personnel involved in such activity will hold many beliefs about how their organization functions. This text uses the philosophy of pragmatic constructivism to show how managerial beliefs that underlie action can be made explicit and so facilitate their assessment and improvement. This involves recognizing and integrating the four dimensions (facts, possibilities, values, and communication) that represent how managers relate to the reality in which they operate. When managerial beliefs are based on an accurate representation of reality, they are more likely to be successful. Problems occur where reality is misrepresented in managerial beliefs. This is especially so in performance management, as the book illustrates using real-world examples. Specific topics addressed include planning and decision making, performance management of investment center managers, strategic performance management, and operational performance management.
"With Kanban, every minute you spend on a software project can add value for customers. One book can help you achieve this goal: Agile Project Management with Kanban. Author Eric Brechner pioneered Kanban within the Xbox engineering team at Microsoft. Now he shows you exactly how to make it work for your team. Think of this book as {28}Kanban in a box.
Ein Praxisleitfaden für frisch gebackene und erfahrene Manager gleichermaßen. Er vermittelt die praktischen Grundlagen des Projektmanagement. Mit einer Fülle von Checklisten, Tools, Taktiken und Hinweisen zu Fehlerquellen. Die Kapitel bilden in sich geschlossene Einheiten - ideal für schnelles Nachschlagen oder die Suche nach Problemlösungen, so dass bei gezielten Fragen nicht das gesamte Buch durchgearbeitet werden muss. Das im Buch enthaltene Material ist einmalig: Es basiert auf Beispielen aus der täglichen Praxis und bietet praxiserprobte Methoden und Lösungen aus dem reichen Erfahrungsschatz des Autors. Harvey Levine kann auf fast 40 Jahre Erfahrung im Projektmanagement zurückblicken. Er ist ein angesehenes Mitglied der Projektmanagement Community, schreibt für zahlreiche Fachpublikationen und ist als Consultant tätig.
Your must-have tool for perfect project management Want to take your career to the next level and be a master of planning, organising, motivating and controlling resources to meet your goals? This easy-to-use guide has you covered! Project Management Checklists For Dummies takes the intimidation out of project management, and shows you step by step how to use rigorous self-check questions to save significant time—and headaches—in managing your projects effectively. Project Management Checklists For Dummies gives you to-do lists, hands-on checklists and helpful guidance for managing every phase of a project from start to finish. Before you know it, you'll be a star project manager as you organise, estimate and schedule projects in today's time-crunched, cost-conscious global business environment. Includes useful to-do lists and checklists to ensure all the necessary steps are completed Offers simple exercises to help clarify needs and requirements along the way Provides templates to complete, which can also be downloaded from Dummies.com and customised to suit your unique requirements Supplies hints and tips to help you along the way If you're a project manager—or any professional charged with managing a project and wondering where to start—Project Management Checklists For Dummies is your ready-made tool for success.
This is the revised edition of the first text book in English specially developed for training for IPMA-D and IPMA-C exams, now based on Version 4 of the ICB. In this 4th edition, the text has been restructured and extended to align with the structure and scope of the competence elements in the ICB version 4, divided into Practice competences, People competences and Perspective competences. Therefore, this book will be essential guidance and study book for everyone studying for the IPMA-D, IPMA-C and IPMA-B exams. Besides that, it is an extremely rich source book for those project managers that have committed themselves to a lifelong professional development. In addition, the book had to be applicable to groups of project managers originating from diverse cultures. For this reason, this is not a book that tells how a Westerner must behave in an Arab or an Asian country, but one that looks at the different subjects covered in the ICB, as seen from diverse cultural standpoints. Each chapter is based on the same structure: Key concepts, Introduction, Actions that lead to competence development, Self-assessment, Special topics, Assignments. Text boxes, additional to the main text, give additional explanation to the main text. An elaborate Index of terms allows that this book can be used as a highly up-to-date information source to all aspects of project management. Next to that all, a web-site is available with videos, discussion fora on specific topics, and the opportunity to discuss with the author.
