Book Review: Oreilly’s “Making Things Happen” by Scott Berkun | July 2nd, 2008
I stumbled onto a copy of Making Things Happen (Second Edition) a few weeks ago here at Nitobi and I’ve finally had a chance to give it a good going-over when I was at the lake this weekend. This is a good book – let me say right off. I liked both the style of writing (very straightforward, employing limited amounts of jargon), and the methodical experience-based approach to explaining project management. Its definitely written from a software-development perspective (the author having worked on projects like Windows and Internet Explorer for Microsoft) but the insights contained would pretty much apply to any team-based project situation.
The author speaks from a place of experience. The book is littered with insights one could only gain from years of ground-level project management – probably with the same types of quirky software developers you and I deal with all the time (ourselves included, no doubt).
Topics covered include:
- How to make things happen
- How to make good decisions
- Specifications and requirements
- Where ideas come from
- How to manage ideas
- How not to annoy people
- Leadership and trust
- Midgame / endgame strategy
- The truth about making dates
- What to do when things go wrong
- Power and politics
- Team communication & relationships
- Visions and plans
These items above are the broad strokes (lifted from the author’s website). Getting into it, I also encountered such gems as:
- What to do when there are no winning choices
- How to use research as ammunition
- What to do if there is no time for project planning
- How to come up with new ideas
- Managing the chaos of idea generation
- How to know when specs are ‘complete’
- Why projects run long
- Managing difficult team members
- How to write diplomatic emails!
- Run meetings that don’t annoy people
- What to do when everything goes to hell
- How pressure affects the project and productivity
- All about the ‘Hero Complex’ (this is a good one)
- Basic tools for getting things done (prioritized lists and such)
- All about the politics of teams and projects
He caps each chapter off with some exercises, making this a useful resource for teaching a course on project management, although I rarely did more than just glance at them.
Rotten-tomatoes style I give this a rating of 90%. The only substantial criticism I would give is that sometimes it does seem a bit rambling, but those digressions were usually quite entertaining so its hardly a reason not to go pick up a copy of your own. BTW you can buy it right now from Amazon by clicking here: Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly))