Any suggestions for good resource (or even a BOOK) on latest project management methods?

[Deburred -]

Hi all

I'm increasingly involved as PM on my crew's engineering projects ( not Software or code, actual physical world products) so wondering if there are any suggestions in the hive mind that could help this slightly reluctant PM to work better! Book titles especially welcome as I need the break from too much screen time.

Thanks!

[Andre Amorim]

Hi Fellow,

I am enrolled at a module at Open University about project management. We follow
PRINCE ( PRojects In Controlled Environments)
https://www.prince2.org.uk/faq/

best,

AA

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[Scott Young]

I am an electrician here in Canada and I have had to manage individual apprentices up to multiple teams on multiple sites. One book I found helpful was Good Boss, Bad Boss by Robert Sutton. Its not all great but it certainly has some nuggets of wisdom.

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[Adrian Godwin]

Having enjoyed my share of both, I would definitely take note of Scott's suggestion and think about how to manage effectively. A good manager makes an enormous difference to a project via both morale and organisation. As does a bad one :).

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[deanforbes]

well it depends on what you mean by project management, I have trained and have been certified in Agile (DSDM) Prince (Practitioner) and as a PMP (PMI) - PMBOK 

Agile is dancing around its good for light projects common in software but you still need to have controls in place despite what many developers want 

Prince  is focused on the Business side with stage boundaries are big thing and organisational structure but is really lacking on how to do stuff 

PMI is quite technical 

All of the above will fail if treated as a prescriptive solution all should be tweaked to suit what you are doing 

Project management is many things but the three core things are 

you need to lead 

you need to organise 

You need to have a plan 

There more tools out there than you can shake a stick at...  many are just list tools - you can do this with any list tool even excel or note pad, the next level up is something that uses pert and does some resource scheduling accounting etc MS Project is a tool that can be used for small medium and some slightly larger projects (there is an open source equivalent that is probably good for small and medium sized projects  https://openproj.en.uptodown.com/windows

If you dont have a large budget large team etc etc in all honesty a list or very basic tool will more often than not suffice 

[Deburred -]

Thanks for all the suggestions! Will follow these wise words. My character isn't ideal for project management as I'm a just in time, risk taking sort of personality so there usually comes a time when we just have to style it out.

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[deanforbes]

another useful tool that can help with clarity is the RACI model even if you dont do it but just think about it 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U2gngDxFkc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kHtzNqpXz8

[michael....@gmail.com]

One tool I use a lot is a kanban board (MS Planner or Trello usually), you use them to track actions against specific topics/work streams, assign them to people and give deadlines: once everything that needs to be done is on the board, it's quite simple to go through the list of actions once a day and make sure that everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing, what was done yesterday, what's gonna get done today and if there are any blockers.

hope this helps

Michael