Book Review by Neil S. Moysenko,
Neil wrote this review for Dr. Gary Klein's Project Management
class at UCCS University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Topics Covered
The theme of the book is that speed to market, particularly being first, gives you the best chance of obtaining a dominating market share, which allows you to reap short term and long term financial benefits. After short preliminaries, the first chapter begins with the typical “what’s-in-it-for-me”, and then continues to provide a brief overview of senior management’s role to create the best possible conditions for projects to succeed. The remaining 9 chapters cover the fundamentals of project management and organizational leadership necessary to create these conditions and manage for success.
The book effectively highlights that if you let certain aspects of management fall to the wayside, your new product will get to market too late, which will kill your chances for success. The following topics are segmented into their own chapters for easy reference:
- Organizational culture and conditions
- Strategy, vision, and planning
- Time management
- Resource allocation
- Monitoring and controls
- Risk management
- Quality management
- Prototypes and production
- Learning and competence
Readability
This concise book gets straight to the point to provide relevant information about project management and leadership. The intended audiences are managers who already have an understanding of project management. The information is presented in a logical manner that makes everything easy to understand during the initial reading, and easy to find specific topics when referring back later. For the most part, the text is in common and non-technical phrases, and includes a reasonable amount of visual aids (graphs and lists). The aids and topics are well identified: readers could easily read the text and find its supporting visuals; or just jump to a visual aid of interest and quickly find its related text.
Limitations
Although the authors are accomplished in the field of project management, thankfully, the book does not provide an in-depth analysis of the industry research, so it is not crammed with empirical data. Keep in mind that the audience is expected to have an understanding of project management; the book goes only so far as identifying which activities should be performed without detailed instructions.
Overall Evaluation
I found this book to be a practical guide for project management because speed to market could be the determining factor to make or break your project’s success. The book is concise, well-organized, reads easily, and provides insightful information. If you are involved in project management, whether as a project manager or an organizational leader, I recommend that you obtain a copy of Accelerated Project Management for its humble price to help your projects reap all the benefits of being the first to market.
Editor's Note: Thanks Neil! Readers, if you would like to make a comment to review author Neil Moysenko, or add a comment to this page in the website, contact us!
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