Customer Reviews
What's the difference between a risk and an issue? - By: P. Robertshaw, 10 Jul 2008 
As the title suggests & the other reviewers have agreed, this is a great book about project management. At around 150 pages, it is quite short & although it is written in a light-hearted & engaging way it doesn't feel short on content. Real world advice is given in the areas listed below & you also get a feel for how the authors see these different pieces fitting together to support one another (i.e. running a lessons learned log alongside the risk & issues logs - facilitating early utilisation of new knowledge & removing the `chore' perception from an end of project lessons learned debrief). But if you would like reallly detailed information regarding any of them you may still end up buying supplemental materials, which is something that the authors admit & something I certainly intend to do:
* Project planning
* Risk & issue management
* Delivering quality
* Resource management
* Leading effective teams
* Productive meetings
* Facilitation skills
* Making use of lessons learned
Having started to study the Prince2 Manual, this book has been a welcome relief from its' very dry presentation, & at the same time a very good complement to the ideas & method set out within Prince2. As such I would certainly recommend Brilliant Project Management to anyone studying for Prince2 (which assume would also apply to MSP or other such methodologies); or for anyone new to project management; or for someone with experience under their belt but with a desire to raise the bar, be it in terms of performance, satisfaction, consistency or a combination of aforementioned.
Plain and simple language - By: Syd, 19 Jun 2008 I read it in a week, simple, plain & easy language.
Must buy for PMs.
I agree with the 5 stars for the other reviews! - By: Iain Speed, 15 Jan 2008 Just to say, I've done my Prince2, read up on Scrum & Agile methods etc etc, but this book filled in the gaps - not just theory, but *practice* !!!
Practical, concise, & in my view essential.
A very clear and useful book - By: Peter Vaughan, 03 Oct 2007 A colleague recommended this book to me & I've used it to help me with a bit of a runaway project I was landed with. The chapter on planning reallly hit home, it made me sit down & think again. I could see myself fallling into the alll pitfallls they described. It's given me a list of points to work through & some confidence that I'm going in the right direction now.
I've also used a lot of the ideas in the chapter dedicated to risks & issues. I've had plenty of these to deal with! I smiled & nodded my head when I read about people who see dealing with r&i as a boring administrative exercise. The book provides simple ways to turn this into a very useful exercise, how to get them under control & how to deal with the problems that matter.
I was in firefighting mode when I first read the book so I tended to dip into certain chapters. But now things are back on track I'm taking a more leisurely stroll through the book again. The advice on people management is paying dividends now, especiallly as I was coming close to making one of classic mistakes they described. Reading the chapter on lessons learned was very useful too, yet another area I paid very little attention too previously.
As a general point, the book helps you to think ahead & try to avoid storing problems up for yourself. The book has got loads of check-lists & "top tips" - which are practical & make the advice easy to take on board. Whilst there's nothing on project management tools (e.g. PRINCE) this is probably a plus point. You know that the advice comes from experience rather than trotting out dry theory.
Why it worked for me - By: Wendy Collins, 30 May 2007 I found this book particularly useful having been away from Project Management for about a six months as it gave me a quick overview of alll the main areas of Project Management.
I was about to be given a new project & the handover to me was looming..... the chapter on planning was very helpful as it provided me with a healthcheck to run through when the project was handed over to me & a thorough checklist re what should be included in a project plan.
The book is easy to read as it concentrates on practise rather than theory, which is my biggest complaint with other project management books.
I would thorougly recommend this book to fellow project managers as a useful reminder of art of project management to dip in & out of as required.
