Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Hybrid

by Robert K. Wysocki

The popular guide to the project management body of knowledge, now fully updated

Now in its seventh edition, this comprehensive guide to project management has long been considered the standard for both professionals and academics, with nearly 40,000 copies sold in the last three editions! Well-known expert Robert Wysocki has added four chapters of new content based on instructor feedback, enhancing the coverage of best-of-breed methods and tools for ensuring project management success.

With enriched case studies, accompanying exercises and solutions on the companion website, and PowerPoint slides for all figures and tables, the book is ideal for instructors and students as well as active project managers.

Serves as a comprehensive guide to project management for both educators and project management professionals Updated to cover the new PMBOK® Sixth Edition  Examines traditional, agile, and extreme project management techniques; the Enterprise Project Management Model; and Kanban and Scrumban methodologies Includes a companion website with exercises and solutions and well as PowerPoint slides for all the figures and tables used Written by well-known project management expert Robert Wysocki

Effective Project Management, Eighth Edition remains the comprehensive resource for project management practitioners, instructors, and students.

(PMBOK is a registered mark of the Project Management Institute, Inc.) 

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Management, Reference, Professional Development, Grad School, Textbooks

612 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you are aiming for a career in IT project management and plan to work for a very large corporation with a large budget, this book may be helpful to you, as that is the field of experience of the author.

Otherwise, you will find his examples throughout the book very frustrating, as he does not relate his theories to other business or professional fields, volunteer organizations, or other areas where project management skills may be utilized. The chapters are long and he is VERY long winded, saying in 40 pages what could be said in 10. It also often feels like he is assuming the learner has previous experience in the project management field, which is often not the case with an undergraduate level college learner.

It is obvious Wysocki has a lot of experience and is proud of it, but the book is heavily overloaded with the author's self-promotion and he never misses an opportunity to toot his own horn. My instructor also indicated that the test bank for the Wysocki book was riddled with errors. This was quite evident on the tests we took that were generated from it.

After a few semesters with this book, my local college received so many complants from Project Management students that they are changing the text for next semester to Project Management: A Managerial Approach by Jack R Meredith and Samual J Mantel by Wiley Publishing.

If you can wade through this tome, there are concepts that will be useful to you, but you will have to work hard to re-interpret them to the field of project management in general.

[Jayesh Naithani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read 14 of the 18 chapters as part of the Software Project Management course (SEIS625) at the Graduate Programs in Software, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul.

The text provided a good introduction about the Project Management process from the perspective of software development projects. The book describes the Project Management Lifecycle, consisting of the five process groups, in the context of four typical style of projects - Traditional, Agile, Extreme, and Emertxe (extreme spelled backwards). The five process groups are namely Scoping, Planning, Launching, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing defined by the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK).

The author, Robert K. Wysocki, an experienced project manager provides many insights based on his experience and perspective through out the book - and continually keeps and steers the discussion towards a common sense approach to Project Management. Project Management, according to Dr. Bob, is organized common sense.

Definitely a good text if you are looking for an introduction to Project Management, especially from a software development perspective, and are interested in advancing to the next level in the practice and understanding of this discipline.

[Monica St. Dennis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolutely terrible, and I only had to read three-quarters of it for class. I don't think I learned one single thing.

[Tom Quast · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book about project management. The author presents a myriad of different models and approaches, grouping them in Traditional, Agile, Extreme, and Emertxe (extreme spelled backwards). The author seems very experienced and presents project management from many different angles.

The Good
- Very thorough presentation of concepts
- Illustrations help to explain the concepts
- Chapters are self contained

The Bad
- Too long, several repetitions
- Often abstract and little guidance on how to implement in real live

Conclusion
A good book that is held back by its content. It strives for giving a complete overview, but gets lost in the details. The amount of presented models is staggering and there is little information on how to implement this in the real world. It is a shame because this book presents many relevant content, but the reader has to work unnecessarily hard to extract this information and apply it to their context.

[Amy Meyer · Rating 1 out of 5]

The text was required for class, and I was initially excited to read it. I soon found that it was edited poorly and contains a myriad of alphabet soup, which is useful to the author and worthless to the learner.

The author repeats sections throughout and gives very little context to the concepts that he discusses. He toots his horn a lot, which is also very hard to read when the concepts aren't being made clear.

Throughout my read, I was impressed with how little the author cared about my education on the subject matter insofar as I understood he was an expert.

I really can't express how disappointed I was in the content of this book and the fact that my university included this in the required readings.

[EGRG · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good overview of project management, but very long winded and repetitive. Makes a lot of statements without much backing evidence. I got some helpful insights from this book but it could have been 50% shorter.

[Stein Karlsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long and educational on the the different project management practices.

[Jannis Fröhlking · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provides a good overview of Project Management

[Dave Woroch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good and easy to read,
If you are willing to learn PM, go ahead!

[Rachel Lefkakis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very insight

[Michael Haase · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is unreadable and people who make up or use this many arbitrary acronyms deserve a special place in hell. Emertxe PMLC? What the fuck is wrong with this guy?

[Tori Scott]

Haven't read it all but I'm writing my exam today, and will be turning off Kindle's ability to post my textbook reading activity to Goodreads :D

[Sergei · Rating 1 out of 5]

Avoid this book. It is a compilation of multiple author's work on everything. Too much of information way too little, if any, focus. The answer is 42.
Too much of I/Me/My. No doubt, the author possesses a lot of knowledge on PM, he is a working consultant as well. Quite often consultants choose to overwhelm potential clients with useful information for free to prove their value. Nothing wrong with that. Other than that, the potential clients are usually left with multiple questions with no one to answer them, other than the consultant himself, but this time on different conditions.

[Ricardo Vargas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book if you want to understand the difference from the traditional project management method and the agile, extreme programming, scrum, etc.

Livro bastante interessante se você deseja compreender a diferença do método tradicional de gestão de projetos e compará-los com agile, extreme programming e scrum.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Specifically software project management. Lays out a different perspective of all the PM activities than PMBOK and included lots of practical content versus just the 'getting certified' content. Having no interest in being a PM, this illuminated lots of practicalities that I appreciate as I work through SW projects as a team member wearing different hats.

[Ignacio · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an excellent book as a reference for traditional and non traditional management techniques, but lacks of deep in agile methods.

[Will Mosher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am by no means a go-to resource on the subject of Project Management, but this seems like a very thorough overview of the practices and challenges (especially paired with the PMBOK.)

[Shannon]

My newest etextbook for For PROJECT MANAGEMENT INTEGRATION I (CAPSTONE PROJECT Course 1)which Start today

[Leo Pitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book contains a huge amount of information but it is very long-winded, extremely dry and rather inaccessible.

[Oruero]

this is simple but advance textbook. I presently reading it.

Oruero Emmanuel