Author: Jason Kemp

A few months ago, I was in my favourite, local, non-corporate giant bookstore looking at the computer books for anything worth looking at. Normally, general bookstores’ computer books collection is pretty anemic, but this one has always been quite good. Scanning the shelves, my eyes kept falling on this one book: The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun. I had read the back (it sounded interesting), then put it back on the shelf. About a week later, I came back, picked it up, browsed through it, made a decision to buy it then put it back on the shelf. About a week later, it came in the mail from Amazon. These things are expensive, man!

A more accurate title is The Art of Project Management at Microsoft, but it’s no less valuable because of it. Berkun was a PM on Windows, IE4 and MSN teams at Microsoft from 1994 to 2003. Since, during this period, Micrsoft took over the world, they must be doing something right with how they manage their projects. Berkun’s book describes the whole process from planning a project, designing it, writing about the design of it, coding it, testing it, prioritizing its bugs and, finally, getting the damn thing out the door. Not only does he describe that nuts and bolts of the process, but he discusses how to manage the people involved in the project.

One of the key strengths of this book was that it acknowledged the people involved in projects. The entire thing is written in the first person, so you can relate to his experiences, some he learns the hard way. All throughout, his tips on email, meetings, acknowledging effort, decision making and leadership are refreshingly sensical. If you’re in project management role, and have no management training and no budget to get any, I recommend this book whole-heartedly. If Berkun were on my team as project manager, I’d be one happy camper. His perspective on the later stages of a project piqued my interest as well, since I have little experience with that aspect of the project, bug triage and war teams especially. Everyone should read his section on bug priority versus bug severity.

The book is about 450 pages with small type: it’s dense. It takes a while to read and some parts are dry; luckily though, it was written as a reference, so you can bounce around if you need to. However, I recommend reading the whole thing at least once. It’s definitely worth the time.

Recommended.