The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

As i mentioned in my (short) review of ’97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know’, i love the format of these “97 Things” books. I already pre-ordered the upcoming ’97 Things Every Programmer Should Know’ and was curious about the other book in the series: 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know.

Now, i’m not a project manager and have no intentions of becoming one in the future. But as a software developer, i do think it’s important to have an understanding of what good (and bad) project management entails so i’d recommend this book to project managers as well as developers. As usual with books in this series, it’s full of useful, real-world advice and common sense contributed by experienced and established project managers. Each piece of advice is again only 2 small pages, and no topic is ever discussed too in-depth. While not everyone will get something out of every bit of advice, there surely will be quite a few that’ll make you think about improvements that can be made in your company.

While there is no structure in the order of the tips, the book does list each tip by topic in the beginning. Topics that are covered are agile methods, general software development, managing people and teams, dealing with distributed teams, improving communication, managing stakeholders, project processes, dealing with requirements, dealing with end-users and self-management. The book claims to be useful to project managers in general and not just for software projects, though i think non-software project managers will probably not get a lot of valuable information out of this book since the large majority of the tips are rather specific to software development.

Definitely worth reading.