Project Leadership

Managing people is difficult wherever you work. But in the tech industry, where management is also a technical discipline, the learning curve can be brutal - especially when there are few tools, texts, and frameworks to help you. In this practical guide, author Camille Fournier (tech lead turned CTO) takes you through each stage in the journey from engineer to technical manager.

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation? Most people think it's because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products.

In The Unicorn Project, we follow Maxine, a senior lead developer and architect, as she is exiled to the Phoenix Project, to the horror of her friends and colleagues, as punishment for contributing to a payroll outage. She tries to survive in what feels like a heartless and uncaring bureaucracy and to work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork, and approvals. One day, she is approached by a ragtag bunch of misfits who say they want to overthrow the existing order, to liberate developers, to bring joy back to technology work.

Product management has become a critical connective role for modern organizations, from small technology startups to global corporate enterprises. And yet the day-to-day work of product management remains largely misunderstood. In theory, product management is about building products that people love. The real-world practice of product management is often about difficult conversations, practical compromises, and hard-won incremental gains.

A young, untested team of problem solvers challenged with saving their company moves from board room to classroom in search of answers - and finds them through lively, open discourse with their innovative professor. This gripping, fast-paced business novel does for project management what Eliyahu M. Goldratt's other novels have done for production and marketing.

As executives build and nurture their organization's strategic agility in today's turbulent, uncertain business environment, the ability to lead strategic change has become more critical than ever. The Strategic Project Leader, Second Edition will help project managers lead with confidence in temporary, ambiguous team structures that execute risk-laden work in an increasingly agile project environment. The book provides practical guidance to help you move from project manager to service-based project leader.

The world is facing a global leadership crisis. Seventy-seven percent of leaders think they do a good job of engaging their people, yet 88 percent of employees say their leaders don't engage enough. Based on extensive research, including assessments of more than 35,000 leaders and interviews with 250 C-level executives, The Mind of the Leader concludes that organizations and leaders aren't meeting employees' basic human needs of finding meaning, purpose, connection, and genuine happiness in their work.

As mobile and web technologies continue to evolve rapidly, there is added pressure to develop and implement software projects in weeks instead of months. Agile Project Management for Dummies can make that happen. This is the first book to provide a simple, step-by-step guide to Agile project management approaches, tools, and techniques.

No project management training? No problem! In today’s workplace, employees are routinely expected to coordinate and manage projects. Yet, chances are, you aren’t formally trained in managing projects - you’re an unofficial project manager. FranklinCovey experts Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore, and James Wood understand the importance of leadership in project completion and explain that people are crucial in the formula for success.

Microsoft project veteran Scott Berkun offers a collection of essays on field-tested philosophies and strategies for defining, leading, and managing projects. Each essay distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice, and the new edition now adds more value for leaders and managers of projects everywhere.

In Project to Product, value stream network pioneer and technology business leader Dr. Mik Kersten introduces the Flow Framework - a new way of seeing, measuring, and managing software delivery. The Flow Framework will enable your company's evolution from project-oriented dinosaur to product-centric innovator that thrives in the age of software. If you're driving your organization's transformation at any level, this is the audiobook for you.

The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, 5th Edition: The Comprehensive, Easy to Read Handbook for Beginners and Pros is a comprehensive guide to real-world project management methods, tools, and techniques. Practical, easy-to-use, and deeply thorough, this book gives you the answers you need now. You'll find cutting-edge ideas and hard-won wisdom of one of the field's leading experts, delivered in short, lively segments that address common management issues.

Agile, say its enthusiasts, can transform your company, catapulting you to the head of the pack. Not so fast. In this clear-eyed and indispensable audiobook, Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much-needed reality check. They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied agile's growth - the idea that it can reshape your organization all at once, for instance, or that it should be used in every function and for all types of work.

For close to three decades, Fundamentals of Project Management has helped managers tackle the complexities of the job. Succinct and easy to digest, this handbook simplifies concepts, answers questions, and helps tame the chaos that can erupt as projects move from planning to completion. The Sixth Edition of this trusted bestseller offers the practical guidelines and tools project managers have come to expect, along with new information explaining changes to the PMBOK® Guide, 7th Edition.

In today's time-pressured, cost-conscious global business environment, tight project deadlines and stringent expectations are the norm. Project Management For Dummies shows business professionals what works and what doesn't by examining the field's best practices. You can learn how to organize, estimate, and schedule projects more efficiently.

For the last 15 years you've been fed a diet of methods and processes as the answer to failing projects. Yet, the best projects are the result of the person that leads them and the environment they create. In order to delight stakeholders and transform organizations you need the skills to inspire project teams and create a culture of success.

Around the world, product teams are waking up to the same uncomfortable truth: doing things “the right way” doesn’t matter if your team loses its funding or your company goes out of business. Simply put, product teams can no longer afford to be disconnected from the business impact of their work. And well-trodden “best practices” from Silicon Valley behemoths can only provide so much guidance for teams working across vastly different business and funding models.

No organization is totally free from destructive friction; the forces that make it harder, more complicated and sometimes downright impossible to get things done. Drawing on years of research and featuring case studies on the likes of Uber, Netflix and Boeing, The Friction Project teaches listeners how to become 'friction fixers'. Stanford professors Sutton and Rao unpack how we should think and act like trustees of others' time. They provide friction forensics to help listeners identify where to avert and repair bad friction, and where to maintain and inject good friction.

Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant new reality. But more modest endeavours, whether launching a small business, organizing a conference, or just finishing a work project on time, commonly fail. Why? Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg. In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors that lead projects to fail, and the research-based principles that will make yours succeed.

The definitive account of the Scrum methodology from its cocreator and the CEO of Scrum, Inc., Jeff Sutherland. Scrum is the revolutionary approach to project management and team building that has helped to transform everything from software companies to the US military to health care in major American hospitals. In this major new book, its originator, Jeff Sutherland, explains precisely and step by step how it operates - and how it can be made to work for anyone, anywhere.