Book recommendations for Project Management
A fine selection of books, recommended by our mentors and mentees. Probably the best you can find. And the best is: You can support us by buying books directly from the library.
Scrum - The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
Jeff Sutherland
We live in a world that is broken. For those who believe that there "must "be a more efficient way for people to get things done, here from Scrum pioneer Jeff Sutherland is a brilliantly discursive, thought-provoking book about the management process that is changing the way we live. In the future, historians may look back on human progress and draw a sharp line designating ""before "Scrum" and ""after" Scrum." Scrum is "that" ground-breaking. It already drives most of the world's top technology companies. And now it's starting to spread to every domain where people wrestle with complex projects. If you've ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, Scrum is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains of as much as 1200% have been recorded, and there's no more lucid - or "compelling" - explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland, the man who put together the first Scrum team more than twenty years ago. The thorny problem Jeff began tackling back then boils down to this: people are spectacularly bad at doing things quickly and efficiently. Best laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross purposes to each other. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars. Drawing on his experience as a West Point-educated fighter pilot, biometrics expert, early innovator of ATM technology, and V.P. of engineering or CTO at eleven different technology companies, Jeff began challenging those dysfunctional realities, looking for solutions that would have global impact. In this book you'll journey to Scrum's front lines where Jeff's system of deep accountability, team interaction, and constant iterative improvement is, among other feats, bringing the FBI into the 21st century, perfecting the design of an affordable 140 mile per hour/100 mile per gallon car, helping NPR report fast-moving action in the Middle East, changing the way pharmacists interact with patients, reducing poverty in the Third World, and even helping people plan their weddings and accomplish weekend chores. Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and many other disciplines, "Scrum "is consistently riveting. But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable - whether it be inventing a trailblazing technology, devising a new system of education, pioneering a way to feed the hungry, or, closer to home, a building a foundation for your family to thrive and prosper.
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Productivity Project
Chris Bailey
A fresh, personal, and entertaining exploration of a topic that concerns all of us: how to be more productive at work and in every facet of our lives. Chris Bailey turned down lucrative job offers to pursue a lifelong dream—to spend a year performing a deep dive experiment into the pursuit of productivity, a subject he had been enamored with since he was a teenager. After obtaining his business degree, he created a blog to chronicle a year-long series of productivity experiments he conducted on himself, where he also continued his research and interviews with some of the world’s foremost experts, from Charles Duhigg to David Allen. Among the experiments that he tackled: Bailey went several weeks with getting by on little to no sleep; he cut out caffeine and sugar; he lived in total isolation for 10 days; he used his smartphone for just an hour a day for three months; he gained ten pounds of muscle mass; he stretched his work week to 90 hours; a late riser, he got up at 5:30 every morning for three months—all the while monitoring the impact of his experiments on the quality and quantity of his work. The Productivity Project—and the lessons Chris learned—are the result of that year-long journey. Among the counterintuitive insights Chris Bailey will teach you: · slowing down to work more deliberately; · shrinking or eliminating the unimportant; · the rule of three; · striving for imperfection; · scheduling less time for important tasks; · the 20 second rule to distract yourself from the inevitable distractions; · and the concept of productive procrastination. In an eye-opening and thoroughly engaging read, Bailey offers a treasure trove of insights and over 25 best practices that will help you accomplish more.
ViewThe Pyramid Principle - Logic in Writing and Thinking
Barbara Minto
The communication of ideas, whether to colleagues or clients, is one of the key factors in determining personal success. The Pyramid Principle shows how to structure and present arguments so that they gain immediate understanding.
ViewHBR's 10 Must Reads on Platforms and Ecosystems (with bonus article by "Why Some Platforms Thrive and Others Don't" By Feng Zhu and Marco Iansiti)
Harvard Business Review, Marco Iansiti, Karim R. Lakhani, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker
Help your company adapt to the new rules of competition. If you read nothing else on creating value with business platforms and ecosystems, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you reap the rewards of multisided platforms (MSPs)—or defend your company against these formidable opponents. This book will inspire you to: Assess the threat of disruption from platforms in your industry Decide whether and how to play with increasingly powerful platform businesses Choose the right strategy for transforming your product into a platform Harness network effects to maximize value for the partners in your ecosystem Shift from managing products to managing interactions Learn when moving first and growing fast will work—and when it won’t Manage winner-take-all dynamics This collection of articles includes "Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy," by Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker, and Sangeet Paul Choudary; "Strategies for Two-Sided Markets," Thomas R. Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne; "Finding the Platform in Your Product," by Andrei Hagiu and Elizabeth Altman; "What's Your Google Strategy?," by Andrei Hagiu and David B. Yoffie; "In the Ecosystem Economy, What’s Your Strategy?," by Michael G. Jacobides; "Right Tech, Wrong Time," by Ron Adner and Rahul Kapoor; "Managing Our Hub Economy," by Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani; "Why Some Platforms Thrive and Others Don't," by Feng Zhu and Marco Iansiti; "Spontaneous Deregulation," by Benjamin Edelman and Damien Geradin; "Alibaba and the Future of Business," by Ming Zeng; and "Fixing Discrimination in Online Marketplaces," by Ray Fisman and Michael Luca. HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever‐changing business environment.
ViewBuilding Successful Partner Channels - Channel Development & Management in the Software Industry
Hans Peter Peter Bech
"Building Successful Partner Channels" is a book laying out the roadmap for achieving global market leadership through independent channel partners in the software industry. When Microsoft acquired Navision in 2002 there is no doubt that the price they paid was heavily influenced by the value of our channel partner eco-system. I can think of no one better suited than Hans Peter to write a book with the title Building Successful Partner Channels. Preben Damgaard, Co-founder and CEO of Navision Predictable growth and market leadership through independent channel partners are on every software industry CEO and sales executives' mind. However, it is rarely achieved. With "Building Successful Partner Channels" Hans Peter Bech provides a great tactical approach toward reaching this goal. Torulf Nilsson, Product Executive, Visma Retail, Oslo, Norway Hans Peter Bech has been at the forefront developing indirect channels in the software industry for more than three decades and his track record is impressive. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone searching for the route to global market leadership in the software industry. Yusuf Soner, School of Management at the Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey Building Successful Partner Channels provides a powerful, practical approach to building a strong network of independent channel partners, so as to optimize sales and marketing activities. The book helps senior sales and marketing executives understand how to work in concert to achieve global market leadership through the indirect-channel approach. Toke Kruse, Founder and CEO at Billy, San Francisco, USA
ViewDelta CX - The Truth About How Valuing Customer Experience Can Transform Your Business
Angie Born, Tanya Netayavichitr, Debbie Levitt
Delta CX is a refreshing model bringing CX and UX together in task and in name with the key goal of improving the products, services, and experiences (PSE) that we offer our potential and current customers. Rather than following trends or drinking the snake oil, Delta CX presents a time-tested, thorough approach that helps you establish values, vision, strategies, and goals. Great PSE require the right teams and strategies in place to proactively predict and mitigate the risk of delivering wrong or flawed PSE. Adopting Delta CX means we all finally speak the same language, from tasks and deliverables to job titles and required skills to where CX fits into Agile organizations to processes and teams. Calculate the ROI of investing more time and resources into building the right PSE the first time. Save time, money, and sanity. Replace guessing and assumptions with Lean customer research that is planned, conducted, and interpreted by experts. Learn why quality should be our #1 priority, and how to rededicate our organization to our external and internal customers.Target audiences: Managers, workers, practitioners, freelancers, consultants, contractors, execs, stakeholders, and everybody else working in CX, UX, Marketing, Product Management, Engineering, Project Management. Business Analysts (BAs), Data Scientists, Writers, Visual Designers, Information Architects, Interaction Designers, Product Designers, and Researchers.The long and problem-focused version: In an era of faster, faster, faster, our workplaces are sacrificing quality, collaboration, culture, and the customer experience to "just ship it." Business goals don't seem to align with customers' needs. Customers constantly raise their standards and expectations, and they notice when companies are out of touch or get it wrong. Competitors, investors, shareholders, the press, bloggers, social media, and Wall Street also notice. Brands are being surprised when their products, services, and experiences (PSE) are disliked or rejected by customers, or go viral for the wrong reasons. Companies claim they are customer-focused, user-centric, and designing for the needs of real customers. Initiatives to increase the ability to build the right PSE should have meant hiring more CX and UX talent. However, with UX still misunderstood, circumvented, overruled, and excluded at many companies, workplaces that didn't know how to assess CX and UX talent hired anybody who put "UX" on their resume. Poor hiring choices lead to silos and "bad design." Rather than wondering if "UX" workers were unqualified, leadership blamed UX and User-Centered Design (UCD): They must be bloated, outdated, not Lean, not Agile things we don't really need. We started imagining that "everybody can be a designer." Get people sketching in design sprints, and solve our company's biggest challenges. We called for democratization and decentralization of UX and design because perhaps taking some power away from these "high-ego UX people" we hired will fix this. Suddenly, everybody was a design thinker doing design thinking, yet few people can agree on what design thinking is.Everybody became quietly desperate. UX practitioners wanted to evangelize, and invited teammates to UX evangelism presentations, which often backfired. Companies of all sizes and ages, including Fortune 500s, tried methodologies designed for startups. Startups fail roughly 95% of the time. It's so rare that they innovate or build something the public actually wants. Why would we want to emulate a segment with such a high failure rate? We're lost. We need another business transformation, a return to prioritizing the quality of what we ideate, architect, design, test, build, and unleash on the public.(Return to the top for the short and happy version.)
ViewWorking Backwards - Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
Colin Bryar, Bill Carr
'Essential for any leader in any industry' – Kim Scott, bestselling author of Radical Candor Working Backwards gives an insider's account of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from two long-time, top-level Amazon executives. In 2018 Amazon became the world’s second trillion dollar company after Apple: a remarkable success story for a company launched out of a garage in 1994. How did they achieve this? And how can others learn from this extraordinary success and replicate it? Colin Bryar started at Amazon in 1998; Bill Carr joined in 1999. Their time at Amazon covered a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Echo and Alexa, and Amazon Web Services to life. Through the story of these innovations they reveal and codify the principles and practices that have driven the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known, from the famous 14-leadership principles, the bar raiser hiring process, and Amazon’s founding characteristics: customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence. Through their wealth of experience they offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable. Working Backwards shows how success is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices that you can apply at your own company, no matter the size.
ViewWho - The A Method for Hiring
Geoff Smart, Randy Street
In this instant New York Times Bestseller, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent. The silver lining is that “who” problems are easily preventable. Based on more than 1,300 hours of interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs, Who presents Smart and Street’s A Method for Hiring. Refined through the largest research study of its kind ever undertaken, the A Method stresses fundamental elements that anyone can implement–and it has a 90 percent success rate. Whether you’re a member of a board of directors looking for a new CEO, the owner of a small business searching for the right people to make your company grow, or a parent in need of a new babysitter, it’s all about Who. Inside you’ll learn how to • avoid common “voodoo hiring” methods • define the outcomes you seek • generate a flow of A Players to your team–by implementing the #1 tactic used by successful businesspeople • ask the right interview questions to dramatically improve your ability to quickly distinguish an A Player from a B or C candidate • attract the person you want to hire, by emphasizing the points the candidate cares about most In business, you are who you hire. In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer simple, easy-to-follow steps that will put the right people in place for optimal success.
ViewMade in Japan - Akio Morita and Sony
Akio Morita, Edwin M. Reingold, Mitsuko Shimomura
Sony is one of the most powerful and respected multinational corporations in the world, and Akio Morita is its outspoken chairman. From his global perspective, Morita provides an informative and highly entertaining look at how Japanese business really works.
ViewBusiness Model Generation - A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur
Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition. Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"
ViewRookie Smarts - Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work
Liz Wiseman
Wall Street Journal Bestseller Is it possible to be at your best even when you are underqualified or doing something for the first time? Is it still possible, even after decades of experience, to recapture the enthusiasm, curiosity, and fearlessness of youth to take on new challenges? With the right mindset—with Rookie Smarts—you can. In a rapidly changing world, experience can be a curse. Careers stall, innovation stops, and strategies grow stale. Being new, naïve, and even clueless can be an asset. For today’s knowledge workers, constant learning is more valuable than mastery. In this essential guide, leadership expert Liz Wiseman explains how to reclaim and cultivate this curious, flexible, youthful mindset called Rookie Smarts. She argues that the most successful rookies are hunter-gatherers—alert and seeking, cautious but quick like firewalkers, and hungry and relentless like pioneers. Most importantly, she identifies a breed of leaders she refers to as “perpetual rookies.” Despite years of experience, they retain their rookie smarts, thinking and operating with the mindsets and practices of these high-performing rookies. Rookie Smarts addresses the questions every experienced professional faces: “Will my knowledge and skills become obsolete and irrelevant? Will a young, inexperienced newcomer upend my company or me? How can I keep up?” The answer is to stay fresh, keep learning, and know when to think like a rookie. Rookie Smarts isn’t just for professionals seeking personal renewal; it is an indispensible resource for all leaders who must ensure their workforces remains vital and competitive.
ViewThe Five Dysfunctions of a Team: Team Assessment
Patrick M. Lencioni
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Workshop Team Assessment is a 38-item paper handout that is an excellent team development tool. A key component of the facilitator-lead Five Dysfunctions of a Team Workshop, the Team Assessment delivers what the name implies "a team assessment" rather than an individual self-assessment. It provides participants with an opportunity to begin exploring the pitfalls that are side-tracking their team. Easy to use, the Assessment is ideal for team off-sites, retreats, or a series of team development meetings. It will help teams of all types increase their cohesiveness and productivity.
ViewScaling Teams - Strategies for Building Successful Teams and Organizations
Alexander Grosse, David Loftesness
Leading a fast-growing team is a uniquely challenging experience. Startups with a hot product often double or triple in size quickly—a recipe for chaos if company leaders aren’t prepared for the pitfalls of hyper-growth. If you’re leading a startup or a new team between 10 and 150 people, this guide provides a practical approach to managing your way through these challenges. Each section covers essential strategies and tactics for managing growth, starting with a single team and exploring typical scaling points as the team grows in size and complexity. The book also provides many examples and lessons learned, based on the authors’ experience and interviews with industry leaders. Learn how to make the most of: Hiring: Learn a scalable hiring process for growing your team People management: Use 1-on-1 mentorship, dispute resolution, and other techniques to ensure your team is happy and productive Organization: Motivate employees by applying five organizational design principles Culture: Build a culture that can evolve as you grow, while remaining connected to the team’s core values Communication: Ensure that important information—and only the important stuff—gets through
ViewThe Advantage - Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business
Patrick M. Lencioni
There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides. Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.
ViewManaging Successful Projects with PRINCE2
Axelos
PRINCE2 is firmly established as the world's most practiced method for project management and is globally recognized for delivering successful projects. The updated 2017 guidance, its first since 2009, places a strong emphasis on the scalability and flexibility of the method and on how best to tailor it to the complexity and specific requirements of a project. The best practice represented by the PRINCE2 method is supported by a scheme that offers three levels of certification: Foundation, Practitioner and Professional. The PRINCE2 method comprises of seven themes, principles, and processes and equips practi-tioners with the skills and knowledge to manage projects in a wide range of environments.
ViewValue Proposition Design - How to Create Products and Services Customers Want
Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith
The authors of the international bestseller Business Model Generation explain how to create value propositions customers can’t resist Value Proposition Design helps you tackle the core challenge of every business — creating compelling products and services customers want to buy. This highly practical book, paired with its online companion, will teach you the processes and tools you need to create products that sell. Using the same stunning visual format as the authors’ global bestseller, Business Model Generation, this sequel explains how to use the “Value Proposition Canvas” to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers actually want. Value Proposition Design is for anyone who has been frustrated by new product meetings based on hunches and intuitions; it’s for anyone who has watched an expensive new product launch fail in the market. The book will help you understand the patterns of great value propositions, get closer to customers, and avoid wasting time with ideas that won’t work. You’ll learn the simple process of designing and testing value propositions, that perfectly match customers’ needs and desires. In addition the book gives you exclusive access to an online companion on Strategyzer.com. You will be able to assess your work, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more. Value Proposition Design is an essential companion to the ”Business Model Canvas” from Business Model Generation, a tool embraced globally by startups and large corporations such as MasterCard, 3M, Coca Cola, GE, Fujitsu, LEGO, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more. Value Proposition Design gives you a proven methodology for success, with value propositions that sell, embedded in profitable business models."
ViewReinventing Project Management - The Diamond Approach To Successful Growth And Innovation
Aaron J. Shenhar, Dov Dvir
Projects are the engines that drive innovation from idea to commercialization. In fact, the number of projects in most organizations today is expanding while operations is shrinking. Yet, since many companies still focus on operational excellence and efficiency, most projects fail—largely because conventional project management concepts cannot adapt to a dynamic business environment. Moreover, top managers neglect their company's project activity, and line managers treat all their projects alike—as part of operations. Based on an unprecedented study of more than 600 projects in a variety of businesses and organizations around the globe, Reinventing Project Management provides a new and highly adaptive model for planning and managing projects to achieve superior business results.
ViewThe Trusted Advisor
David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, Robert M. Galford
Bestselling author David Maister teams up with Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford to bring us the essential tool for all consultants, negotiators, and advisors. In today's fast-paced networked economy, professionals must work harder than ever to maintain and improve their business skills and knowledge. But technical mastery of one's discipline is not enough, assert world-renowned professional advisors David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford. The key to professional success, they argue, is the ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients. To demonstrate the paramount importance of trust, the authors use anecdotes, experiences, and examples -- successes and mistakes, their own and others' -- to great effect. The result is an immensely readable book that will be welcomed by the inexperienced advisor and the most seasoned expert alike.
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