Donna Fitzgerald » Book Reviews

Reflections on PM Reading Lists

Donna Fitzgerald — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:33:33 +0000

Glen Alleman on his Herding Cat’s blog just published a list of recommended project management books that I encourage everyone to check out. What I found interesting was the low number of books that overlapped between my list and Glen’s. Obviously we both had Jim Highsmith’s book Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (which in now out in a second addition with more material on agile governance) since we both know and respect Jim’s contribution to the Agile movement but that’s were the similarity ends. In many ways I wish the list had more overlaps since it would reduce the amount of money I’ll be turning over to Amazon in the near future, and in another I’m delighted in the differences. Glen sees the world through different eyes than I do which is why he’s been on my short list of go-to people when I want to understand something from all sides.

I have many books I recommend to people and many books I value but if I actually tell the cold, hard, brutal truth there are only two dog-eared books on my book shelf; Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules by Steve McConnell and The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by Peter M. Senge, et al. Both these books serve one and only one purpose for me. They help me to be (I hope) a better manager and leader for my teams. I don’t manage any more so 5 years from now I might say that I have a new set of dog-eared books but I think there’s some value in sharing why these books earned a place by my side, when I was actually doing the work I now just write about.

The real answer was they were my bullwark against getting lost in the noise and in the minutia that all projects have a tendency to drag us down into. My strength as a leader was my big picture view, my ability to hear what wasn’t being said, and in turn to say what no one else had the courage (or the utter foolishness) to say. If I was too lost in the weeds to see what was happening around me then I wasn’t offer my one UNIGUE contribution to the project. In my post The Decreasing Value Case for Project Management I discussed the fact that many enterprise architects are now saying that this is their job on a project (seeing the forest for the trees) but I know if I were still leading projects it wouldn’t be a role I would give up easily.

The books that keep us grounded and able to lead are generally specific to our personality and our circumstances. One of our clients, Penny Dent, shared with the attendees of her presentation at the PPM Summit, that her book was Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results. She said she given it to all of her project managers and from the sounds of it most of the company has probably read it by now.

So check out Glen’s post. There are some great books there and I’ll be adding a few off the list to my own bookshelf, but I think it’s time to remember that our job description is P (project, program and portfolio) Manager for a reason and that it’s time we started investing an equal amount of our mental energy in improving the M side of the description rather than just the P.

With that said I’d love to hear what books serve as your anchor points. This is one list that will never be definitive or authoritative since it’s all about what speaks to you, but I still think there’s some value in sharing. I look forward to seeing what books the rest of you actually keep close.

The Exercise of Power by the Powerless

Donna Fitzgerald — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:35:00 +0000

I was writing a review at Amazon this morning and I noticed that a book review I had written a couple of months ago had been listed as unhelpful. The book is good, I said it was good and yet someone didn’t like what I said. Ok, I can live with that. Since I have strong opinions, which I express at the drop of a hat, I’m used to people disagreeing. The problem with this situation was that there was something that struck me as being slightly off. After investigaging further it turned out that a single unhelpful vote had been logged against every review of the book.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen a drive-by shooting on a book review. I will never know what Dr. Brown did to upset this individual and I’m sure he will never know either since the person was too passive-agressive to even write a scathing review. The only thing they were capable of doing was indirectly saying “EVERYONE ELSE HERE IS WRONG”.

What’s all this got to do with PPM you might ask? The answer is drive-by shootings happen on projects and programs all the time. For years I tried to deal with these people directly (they’re stakeholders after all) but the problem is they don’t ever want what’s best for the project or for the company or for anyone else around them — they only want what’s best for them. One day I finally realized that it wasn’t possible to change their minds because of the psychological complexity involved. The bottom line was I simply couldn’t transfer power to them and that fundamentally was what they craved.

It took me a long, long time to learn the lesson these individuals had to teach but I finally got it. As stakeholders these people should be viewed as simple forces of nature. We all know the story of the frog and the scorpion, where the scorpion kills the frog in the middle of the river and both frog and scorpion die as a result. The punchline is that the scorpion simply couldn’t help himself.

For me there are two lessons in this situation. The first is the utter silliness of wasting one second trying to change the nature of a scorpion. The second is the lesson that even if it means the scorpion will still vote unhelpful on your “work” for the rest of his or her life you simply can’t afford to EVER let them too far into your project. How you make sure that others accept what you’re doing (by keeping that person at bay) is the measure of your political astuteness and nothing says there won’t be a price to pay but there isn’t any choice.

If this topic resonates with you, check out this article on game theory, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the Scorpion

Reinventing Project Management

Donna Fitzgerald — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:28:15 +0000

I just picked up a new book called Reinventing Project Management by Aaron Shenhar and Dov Dvir. I freely admit what interested me about it is that it looks very similar to the model I’ve been working with for years that I call creating an ”area of order”. I’ve only had time to read snatches so far but it’s definitely looking interesting. If any one’s read it already, please let me know what you thought of it.

Chaos and the Strange Attractor of Meaning

Donna Fitzgerald — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:34:29 +0000

There’s something seductively attractive about the concept of a strange attractor, that force that causes a random, unpredictable system to stay within observable boundaries without becoming either nonrandom or predictable. Margret Wheatley, in her book Leadership and the New Science, talks about the fact that strange attractors reveal the order that is inherent in certain kinds of chaotic systems. This order only appears over a long process of observation, looking at the system on a moment to moment basis will only show chaos.

When I read LNS this concept was the one that I was most fascinated with because it has an almost instinctive resonance with the observable phenomenon in corporations. Something holds these crazy dysfunctional organizations together. Something unobservable even allows them to thrive (based on employment growth and stock market valuation). Wheatley postulates that the strange attractor present in corporations is a sense of SELF. It’s the authentically shared vision of what the corporation is and why it exists rather than the words printed in the company’s vision statement.

Concepts like Senge’s Shared Vision (from a 5^th Discipline) take on concrete importance when looked at through the lens of the science that Wheatley holds out to us. Our vision is what holds us together, it’s what we live every day in our corporations and it is only at the level of SELF that we can change who were are and how we interact with the world.

A New Book to Read

Donna Fitzgerald — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:33:53 +0000

I just got a copy of Stand Back and Deliver by Pollyanna Pixton, Niel Nickolaisen, Todd Little and Kent McDonald. Todd, Pollyanna, Kent and I were all founding members of the Agile Project Leadership Network so I’m excited to read it. The book is focused on practical techniques that are designed to help organizations increase their business agility and if I know the authors (and I do) I have no question the advice they offer will be top notch.

Summer Reading and the Art of Managing a Program Management

Donna Fitzgerald — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:34:37 +0000

At the beginning of every summer I generally kick off a discussion with my peers as to what PPM books we’re planning to read during the summer. To be honest the last couple of years it’s seemed that the choices have been few and far between. I’m delighted to say that’s changed this year thank;s to Dr. James Brown and his immenently readable book. The Handbook of Program Management is possibly misnamed. It isn’t a dry methodological tome. From the moment I picked up the book I realized that Dr. Brown actually knew what he was talking about and had taken the time to share his years of tacit learning with his readers. All the reviews posted at Amazon speak to the same thing. This book is like chatting with a master program manager who is willing to give you lots of practical tips about how to do something rather than just telling you what to do. Just to bring the point home as to how choke full of good advice this book is I randomly opened the book to page 137 and the first thing I was struck by is this quote:

“Asking for and thanking people for their followership is a powerful way to ensure commitment.”

Turns out the entire section I flipped to is about the importance of creating followership and since I’ve written on the same subject myself (see attracting followers) I was immediately left with the feeling that Dr. Brown and I have shared a common experience (managing programs) and that we’ve come to some similiar conclusions that we both think are important enough to share with others. I could probably flip to any random page (and I have) and find a topic that I’ve touched on in my research or written about elsewhere over the years. For those of you how have a PMCoP in your organization I strongly recommend purchasing this book and handing it out. There’s enough in here to keep you meetings going for a least a year.

Happy reading.