It's always a pleasure to review a book written by a fellow CMC (Certified Management Consultant). And it's always a good sign when a book reaches its 3rd edition...certainly a vote of confidence by the publisher (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) that the work it's investing in has bankable potential.

Mickey writes with such clarity and the illustrations speak so well for themselves that you'll find your copy thumb-worn in a couple of months, even if you aren't directly involved in managing complex projects. (You will even find it a valuable resource for personal projects, such as planning a wedding or putting an addition on your house.)

O.K., this book is not exactly bedtime reading. What appeals to me is that its twenty-seven chapters break up the complexity of project management processes into self-contained chunks of practical techniques that you can learn quickly and use on a small project without excessively burdening your brain. Let me give you an example.

Chapter 7 "Scheduling Tools" starts out with an overview of scheduling methods. Bar and milestone charts are presented first. While easy to construct, understand and change (perfection isn't attainable, at least not in THIS lifetime), Mickey points out their inherent weaknesses, the most serious being that interdependencies aren't shown. For example, you need to compile a set of questions (and complete a lot of other preliminary activities) before you set about conducting a customer value survey.

You've all seen (or worked with) those intimidating construction diagrams that were laboriously drawn by hand and are now produced by various flavors of software. These types of network diagrams are a time-honored technique that come burdened with acronyms such as PERT, PDM and TSTETIL (time-scaled tasks with explicit task interdependency linkage...of course).

After a dozen pages presenting different styles, complete with the advantages and drawbacks of each network technique, a refreshing section called "Helpful Hints" comes along. How do you start a network diagram? At each end, with "lots of scrap paper" or different colored Post-it notes you can arrange according to departmental responsibilities, sorting out the dependencies in between. You can then transfer the diagram to your software program, or a clean piece of paper if you're using the paper and pencil method.

The whole book is like this. Whether you're grappling with strategic issues on, for example, which proposals to spend your efforts, or downstream issues such as estimating project costs and assembling a work team, Successful Project Management has a chapter written just for you.

You may purchase this book at discount from Amazon.com by clicking on the link below.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0471293040/technologymanageA/