I certainly tried to understand project management. And to the degree that my goal was simply to understand more about what and why project managers do what they do, I was successful.
A couple hundred pages in, however, I find myself trying to read faster to get through the pages more quickly. When I realized what I was doing, it became clear I should just give up on this book and move on.
It may be I don’t like the Head First approach; the free wheeling mind maps, the puzzle exercises, and the repetition of concepts are the antithesis of the dense and compact style I prefer.
It could also be that I find the full project management process as described by the PMP to be about as practical and memorable as the full software engineering process described by the RUP. A coworker in project management related a view that the PMP is a collection of tools, any of which – but not always all – might be applied to any given project. That’s certainly similar to how few people use the complete RUP, but class diagrams, sequence diagrams, and use cases are ubiquitous.
So… any aspiring project managers want to borrow a highly rated PMP book?
