Project Management: Best Practices for IT Professionals Review

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(More customer reviews)This is not a book about project management, rather it is a collection of IT project management best practices that will guarantee success if they are incorporated into your project management bag of tricks.
Mr. Murch has classified the best practices by providing a set of general practices and a set of specific ones that are aligned to each phase of the system development life cycle. This organization allows you to use this book as a resource guide when planning, estimating and scheduling the project, and as a desk reference when controlling it.
While some of the best practices are widely known (although not as widely practiced), the real gems in this book are: associating tasks with deliverables (too often the deliverable part of the task is not identified during planning, which results in tasks that do not contribute to project goals - if a task does not produce an associated deliverable you need to question why the task is included), project status reporting (the sample status report is excellent, except for one glaring omission discussed below), and the focus on quality assurance and configuration management metrics, which encompasses factors that are frequently missing from IT project controls.
The project status report example is a highlight of this book. Mr. Murch's proposed format will provide a succinct summary of a project's health, and give the project manager, his or her team and the sponsor an ongoing view of the project's status. What mars this otherwise perfect format is an integrated view of cost and schedule performance is completely missing from the picture. He comes close by discussing estimate at completion vs. budget in the project cost performance of the report format, but does not connect it to the schedule performance. A true best practice is to compute a schedule performance index (Budgeted Cost of Work Performed divided by Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled), and a cost performance index (Budgeted Cost of Work Performed divided by Actual Cost of Work Performed). These link schedule and cost performance and show a true picture of the project's health. I hope this gets rectified in the next edition of this excellent book.
Every chapter of this book contains at least one or more gems that will make you a better project manager. I think every IT project manager should have a copy close by. We should applaud Mr. Murch's efforts for successfully cataloging and documenting these IT project management best practices. Despite the incomplete picture his project status report gives this book deserves 5 stars.

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