| Brilliant Project Management: What the Best Project Managers Know, Say and Do | 
 enlarge | Authors: Stephen Barker, Rob Cole
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
Buy New: £4.46
You Save: £5.53 (55%)
New (21) Used (5) from £4.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 974
Media: Paperback
Edition: New title
Pages: 161
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 0273707930
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.404
EAN: 9780273707936
ASIN: 0273707930
Publication Date: March 1, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New. Shipped from UK Mainland. Delivery is usually 2 - 3 working days from order by Royal Mail, International Delivery is by Airmail.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 8 | | NEXT » |
 Brilliant it ain't October 8, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Like most people who buy this sort of book, I had stuff thrust upon me at work, and had to swat up on project management PDQ. I am big fan of short introductory books like the "for dummies" series. This looked similar, so I bought it.
To say that it's useles would not be fair. It does contain useful advice. Most of it is at the level of rudimentary common sense. If put clearly and succinctly, all of it would probably fit into less than 25 pages. The rest of this book is waffle, and mindnumbingly boring waffle at that.
This is the very opposite of brilliant. The book is thin on substance and thin on entertainment value. It is singularly mediocre. AS I have since found out, there are many other books on project management which are more rigorous and more readable.
 What's the difference between a risk and an issue? July 10, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
As the title suggests and the other reviewers have agreed, this is a great book about project management. At around 150 pages, it is quite short and although it is written in a light-hearted and engaging way it doesn't feel short on content. Real world advice is given in the areas listed below and you also get a feel for how the authors see these different pieces fitting together to support one another (i.e. running a lessons learned log alongside the risk and issues logs - facilitating early utilisation of new knowledge and removing the `chore' perception from an end of project lessons learned debrief). But if you would like really detailed information regarding any of them you may still end up buying supplemental materials, which is something that the authors admit and something I certainly intend to do:
* Project planning
* Risk and issue management
* Delivering quality
* Resource management
* Leading effective teams
* Productive meetings
* Facilitation skills
* Making use of lessons learned
Having started to study the Prince2 Manual, this book has been a welcome relief from its' very dry presentation, and at the same time a very good complement to the ideas and method set out within Prince2. As such I would certainly recommend Brilliant Project Management to anyone studying for Prince2 (which assume would also apply to MSP or other such methodologies); or for anyone new to project management; or for someone with experience under their belt but with a desire to raise the bar, be it in terms of performance, satisfaction, consistency or a combination of aforementioned.
Plain and simple language June 19, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I read it in a week, simple, plain and easy language.
Must buy for PMs.
I agree with the 5 stars for the other reviews! January 15, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Just to say, I've done my Prince2, read up on Scrum and Agile methods etc etc, but this book filled in the gaps - not just theory, but *practice* !!!
Practical, concise, and in my view essential.
A very clear and useful book October 3, 2007
31 out of 31 found this review helpful
A colleague recommended this book to me and I've used it to help me with a bit of a runaway project I was landed with. The chapter on planning really hit home, it made me sit down and think again. I could see myself falling into the all pitfalls they described. It's given me a list of points to work through and some confidence that I'm going in the right direction now.
I've also used a lot of the ideas in the chapter dedicated to risks and issues. I've had plenty of these to deal with! I smiled and nodded my head when I read about people who see dealing with r&i as a boring administrative exercise. The book provides simple ways to turn this into a very useful exercise, how to get them under control and how to deal with the problems that matter.
I was in firefighting mode when I first read the book so I tended to dip into certain chapters. But now things are back on track I'm taking a more leisurely stroll through the book again. The advice on people management is paying dividends now, especially as I was coming close to making one of classic mistakes they described. Reading the chapter on lessons learned was very useful too, yet another area I paid very little attention too previously.
As a general point, the book helps you to think ahead and try to avoid storing problems up for yourself. The book has got loads of check-lists and "top tips" - which are practical and make the advice easy to take on board. Whilst there's nothing on project management tools (e.g. PRINCE) this is probably a plus point. You know that the advice comes from experience rather than trotting out dry theory.
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