Review: Bedtime stories for project managers

Marisa Silva asked me to review her book ‘Bedtime stories for project managers: and others with trouble sleeping’.

It is a nice little booklet where you will get eleven fairy tales and a comparison with project management aspects, a theoretical explanation, the morale of the story from a project management perspective and how to cope with this aspect via a process, procedure or techniques and you will get references to related literature. It’s easy to read, it will fresh up your memory regarding the fairy tales and it give some food for thought as a project manager.

The following fairy tales are discussed:

	The fairy tale	The project management perspective
1	Emperor’s new clothes	Executives believing in their own weak business case (and are influenced by cognitive biases, pet projects, political games)
2	The stone soup	Keep the project scope creep under control
3	The three little pigs	the project manager’s risk appetite and risk management
5	The chicken and the pig	are you involved or committed?
6	The little red riding hood	Follow the critical path
7	The six blind men and the elephant	As a project manager, you need to hold a holistic and integrated vision
8	The wolf in sheep’s clothing	Watermelon reporting instead of transparent and honest reporting
9	The old man, the boy and the donkey	Impossible for a project manager to please everyone
10	The boy who cried wolf	Usage of project management ethics
11	The bed of Procrustes	Tailor to suit the project management environment

To order:Bedtime stories for project managers (eBook)

Book review: PRINCE2 Themes, a small eBook from Simon Buehring

I just received a small eBook from Simon Buehring (Knowledge train) explaining the PRINCE2 Themes. It’s in line with their other ebook regarding the PRINCE2 Principles. Of course you can find many PRINCE2 books and articles explaining these PRINCE2 Themes but the power of this eBook is the use of seven graphical mind-maps each showing one of the PRINCE2 Themes. And again, the proof, that a picture says more than a thousand words becomes reality. As stated, this is a little bit more than a picture; it contains text too, but definitely worthwhile reading.

I would suggest that in a next version, some more effort would be put in the Configuration Management topic as part of the Change Theme. Many candidates have problems to understand this part. What are configuration items, how many will you need, what’s the purpose of a configuration Item Record?

In my blog post about their Principles eBook I suggested that Knowledge train would create mind-maps for themes, and processes too. Now we have the Themes too, the Processes must come as well and than foundation candidates will have, with only the mind-maps and no additional text, a nice summary to prepare themselves for the exam.

Please find attached the eBook prince2-themes-ebook or visit www.knowledgetrain.co.uk.

See for my blog post on the Principles part: eBook Principles.