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Rating: 
Summary: Yin to Mythical Man Month's Yan
Review: Where Brook's The Mythical Man Month documents the lessons learned during the development of IBM's OS/360, this 15-year-old book documents the lessons learned during the development of a betting system. The Mythical Man Month focused on project failures (making it probably the first book of anti-patterns), while this book focuses on success. Despite its age this book is probably more valid today than when it was first published, and remains one of the best books on IT project management. Key points:
(1) Heavy emphasis on getting business requirements and ensuring that the solution that unfolds is aligned to those requirements. This also incorporates scope management from the beginning of the project, which, with requirements, is a make-or-break factor for project success.
(2)How to deal with team issues. One of the recurring challenges that the author faced during the project was how to manage the people part of the equation - his approach epitomizes best practices for controlling meetings, coordinating resources and facilitating trade-offs and managing team and customer expectations. What makes this aspect of the book so powerful is the fact that the project was initiated in 'crunch mode' from the beginning. Leadership and management are key themes throughout this book - something that seems to be often left out in more modern books on IT project management.
(3) Estimating and controlling a dynamic project on the fly are two strong points in this book. Although the project is approached as a traditional waterfall development life cycle, and the technical environment described is archaic, the author's approach is as valid using modern techniques and iterative development life cycles that are currently popular. What I like: the book is structured around a case study that runs throughout the book. The case study is a real "crunch mode" project that was tossed in the author's lap, and the book is a chronicle of how the project was successfully completed within a compressed timeframe with a hastily thrown together team. This adds credibility to the methods that are presented, all of which still remain as best practices in IT project management. It also makes this slim, 192-page book highly readable (you can read it in an evening). The chapter on Dealing with Disaster should be required reading for all IT project managers. If the appendix, Brief Description of Design Tools, was updated to show mapping to contemporary tools this book would be as fresh today as when it was first published. In addition to this book I recommend Managing a Programming Project: People and Processes, which contains contributions by the author.
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