Here’s a bit of a diversion from recent reviews. Keeping Score: Project Management for the Pros by Frank Ryle is a lively, yet deceptively prescient look at adapting a variety of management styles to the PM process. Using a narrative centred on golf – both because it offers a shared passion to the project managers and also as a superb metaphor for the exploration of the PM process – Ryle delivers an engaging exploration of current thinking in project management. The short book explores a variety of ways of seeing the processes, techniques and approaches to PM (and I use these terms some trepidation as their precise meanings are an important aspect of this topic).
Ryle’s book is intricately woven with a clear passion and experience with golf. However, like the game or not, this metaphor works both practically as a unique way of approaching the subject but doesn’t suffer should you not have spent time playing the game. The book is subtly structured to work through an ordered approach to the facets of project management in light of a fictitious case devised by the author. The characters in the ‘story’ epitomise unique perspectives to the problem faced and the entire treatment pulls together both the process and the varied approaches to dealing with a project management challenge.
This uniquely approachable and appropriately concise book offers a valuable teaching experience for digital project managers in the DH community. Having lectured over the past few years offering a variety of workshops for new principal investigators a the post-grad, post-doc and staff levels within the academic sector and ruing the fact that there is simply no solid, but approachable volume for newbies to the challenge, this book is a superb candidate for the role.
One of the caveats that informs much of my activity in the area of project management is to take the time up front to get things straight – to take the time to reflect in advance of moving blindly ahead (or mistaking a grant application for a project plan). Taking the time to digest and reflect on the cleverly delivered lessons from this ‘tale’ would serve any of the constituency I have dealt with extremely well and will be one of my strongest recommendations go forward.