Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook: How to Launch, Lead, and Sponsor Successful Projects (HBR Handbooks)

This book was a required textbook. The ISBN and version were exactly as needed. No damage to the book, and it will likely find a good home on a second-hand book store.

It will be useful for anyone involved in a project (from personal to major organisational initiatives), and certainly for sponsors and those who must lead and/or support change.I found the book easy to read, and found practical ideas I can use immediately with my own projects.More importantly, it identifies and fills in some critical gaps in the current project management methodologies and practices, namely:1. It focuses on the fact that projects are approved in order to realise some benefit, and unless that benefit is realised they have essentially failed. Antonio gives good examples of the damage and sheer wastage when we lose sight of the benefits.2. It addresses the key ‘building blocks’ that research and long experience in project management have shown must be addressed to achieve project success.3. It illustrates clearly that these ‘building blocks’ apply equally to all projects, big or small, agile or predictive, whatever arena they address.In Parts One and Two we at last get a clear and simple outline of what it takes to make projects succeed, in everyday terms, and on top of that we get a practical tool, the Project Canvas, to help us do that, with useful guidelines. I believe this will also provide a solid basis for effective project management competency development and awareness building at all levels.Is the Project Canvas the only tool you need to achieve project success?Antonio does not claim or expect this, but what the Project Canvas does is ensure that core basics are in place:• Why are we doing the project?• Who is leading the project?• Do we have what we need to make the project a success?• How will we create the value expected by the project?For the simplest projects I suggest it quite possibly is the only tool you need - but for most projects you will still need to use more detailed project and change management tools and techniques to manage the underlying details of the project e.g. schedules, budgets, risks, resources and ensure project controls and communications are effective. In these more complex project environments I see the Project Canvas as a top level dashboard for governance and communication using language that is understandable to everyone, both in terms of what the purpose and status of the project is, but also what the implications are initially and on an on-going basis, as a guide to likely project success.In Parts 3 and 4 Antonio introduces key concepts and guidelines for multi-project management, how the Project Canvas helps here, and future directions of the Project Economy and project management technology that raise interesting points for further exploration and debate.I urge everyone to read this book, pick a project, any project, and start using the Project Canvas.I have started already!Finally, thank you to Harvard Business Review, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez and NetGalley for making the ARC available for me to review while I waited for my own copy to arrive. It has been a real opportunity for me to validate and consider my own 45+ years of project and portfolio management experience in ways I would probably not have found time to do without the impetus of reviewing this book.

Very informative. I would recommend this book to a person that’s new to progect management.

It was very easy to read and laid out plainly I would buy it again

The book is an exquisite work by Antonio-Nieto Rodriguez where he manages, in a clear and didactic way, to convey the entire universe of Project Management to the reader.It is not a particularly technical book, but it manages to incorporate within its three hundred pages of text all the apparatus necessary to understand the entire organic process of projects and how these projects are part of our entire life, both private and professional.I believe that Antônio managed to deliver to readers a vision that is perhaps quite unknown to those who do not deal with projects on a day-to-day basis and who have not had a technical background in Project Management, when he addresses both issues related to hard skills such as, for example, predictive and adaptive methodologies, portfolio and program management, use of technology and especially when entering the soft skills arena not only for the Project Manager (or Project Leader) as for a participant in the project process who is the sponsor, that should be the subject of a new book.It is important to mention the inclusion of relevant topics today such as the use of IA, crisis management, diversity, and sustainability.As a project manager with decades of career, I am happy to have available now a book that brilliantly manages to present to a wider audience all the necessary framework to understand the real Project Economy.

Highly recommend if you’re a project manager!

First time buying this book.The content is amazing, material not so much.

The bible of project management.