Making Things Happen
About this book
Berkun ran projects at Microsoft on Internet Explorer and Windows, and wrote about the parts of the job that are judgement rather than method. Chapters cover writing a vision document, working out what to do, making decisions on incomplete information, running meetings that produce something, and handling the sag in the middle of a project. A substantial section deals with power and politics, with how to say no, and with what to do when things go wrong in front of an audience. The tone is candid about the mistakes the author made, which makes the advice easier to trust. Written for people leading work in technology organisations rather than for a certification syllabus.
Description via Product Digest.
Topics
Related concepts
- Project scope managementEstablishing what work is in the project and keeping it there, which turns on the difference between product scope and project scope and on whether each change passed through a decision.
- The work breakdown structureA hierarchical decomposition of the total scope into deliverables, governed by the hundred per cent rule and bottoming out at work packages with a dictionary behind them.
- Removing blockersWhat counts as an impediment, why most of them are organisational and few are technical, and how a log turns a run of bad days into a visible pattern.
- The project charterThe official document that creates a project, records the decision to do the work, and names the person who will manage it. A sponsor issues it, and the project manager may write the first draft.
- Issues and the RAID logRisks, assumptions, issues and dependencies in one place, why the boundary between a risk and an issue is the one that matters, and what keeps a log usable.