The One-Page Project Manager for Execution was reviewed in Thursday’s December edition of Project Management Tipoffs, which you can receive free by going here. What follows is a short preview of what you can expect each month from a Tipoffs Book Review. Enjoy!
Author: Clark A. Campbell with Mike Collins
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Size: 182 pages
One of my guilty pleasures (I feel I can admit this amongst fellow PMs) is that I enjoy reading books about project management– and the seemingly endless array of philosophies, techniques and tools for getting the job done. Typically, books of this genre will polarise opinions: you either fully agree or fundamentally disagree with what the author is proposing. And I must admit, when I read the rather ambitious title of this book, I was more than a little sceptical.
This book is not proposing a new methodology or even a technique – instead, it is concerned with project status reporting, and as the title suggests, it’s designed to enable Project Managers to provide a comprehensive update on a projects/programmes status on a SINGLE PAGE of paper. I’m regularly involved in managing complex multi-stakeholder, multi-vendor projects across global time zones – often with the most aggressive timescales, so the idea of fitting status updates onto a single sheet of paper seems decidedly optimistic. That’s until the authors let you into their first little secret. You’re allowed to report on a single page of A3 paper. (Yes, I can hear you all breathing a sigh of relief).
However, in spite of their A3 page trick, I actually like this book – it encourages PM’s to apply the discipline of concise and relevant project status communications and I think that PM’s and businesses could benefit significantly from using this tool. The only pre-requisite is that the leadership/key stakeholders in your organisation would need to be willing to learn how to read OPPM and actually be interested in getting a project update that is longer than a 30 second elevator conversation. However, if all PMs in an organisation were using the single page report format consistently, then the business benefits are certainly clear – enabling you to communicate key information about any project in a few seconds…
- If you want to read the full-body of this book review from guest reviewer Andy Budkiewicz, you can check it out in last week’s December release of Project Management Tipoffs.
- Do you want to review a book for either Tipoffs or the Camel? Contact us today.
- To our UK Camel readers: Don’t forget about the 2011 Project Management Benchmark Report – you could win an iPad just for taking part. And tell your UK colleagues, too: the most accurate portrait that anyone could possibly paint of the UK PPM marketplace comes through your participation.
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