This is the funniest book you'll read about project management, but it's really not about Project.

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Product Description

Keep your project on time, on track, and on target! This book focuses on the core skills you need to successfully manage any project, giving you a practical education in project management and how-to instruction for using Microsoft Office Project and other Microsoft Office programs, such as Microsoft Office Excel®, Outlook®, and Word. Armed with this book full of real-world examples, tips, and tricks, you’ll benefit from the author’s experience and lessons learned over the course of a twenty-year career as a project manager. Learn the essentials of project management, including creating successful project plans, tracking and evaluating performance, and controlling project costs. Whether you’re a beginner just learning how to manage projects or a project manager already working on a project, this book has something for you. Practical, easy-to-use, and packed with information, this book can be read from cover to cover or you can jump directly to any chapter that helps you prepare for your next project management task or respond effectively to a last-minute executive request. Includes a companion CD with sample Project templates.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #152031 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 410 pages

From the Publisher
This indispensable book combines the two topics that many project managers need: a practical education in project management and a how-to guide for using Microsoft Project and other Microsoft Office programs, such as Excel, Outlook, and Word, to successfully manage projects.

Key Book Benefits:

-Covers project management essentials from start to finish—including key tasks to consider before starting a project, to creating successful project plans, evaluating performance, and controlling project costs

-Includes how-to instruction for using Microsoft Project and other Microsoft Office programs to successfully manage projects

-Designed so that you can either read from cover to cover, or pick just the topics you want

-Offers lessons-learned, examples, tips, and tricks from an author with over 20 years of project management experience

-Useful to both beginning-level and experienced project managers

-Includes a companion CD with sample Project templates

About the Author
Bonnie Biafore has worked as a project manager for almost 20 years and now balances her time between project management consulting, training, and writing. Bonnie has written or edited many technical documents, as well as books, magazine articles, and training courses, including Troubleshooting Microsoft Project (Microsoft Press 2002) and Microsoft Project Professional training course (Microsoft Enterprise Learning Library 2003).

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Customer Reviews

This is a book about project management
I wrote this book and it is supposed to be a book about project management with some tips about using Microsoft Project and other programs effectively to manage projects. It is not intended to be a how-to guide for Microsoft Project from start to finish, although it includes techniques that I use all the time to manage projects. I am a PMI-certified Project Management Professional and I manage projects for clients in many industries. The motivation to write this book came from the advice I've had to provide to new (and some more experienced) project managers on many projects.

The idea is to help people relatively new to project management learn about the tasks they should perform to manage a project successfully and how to use Project and other Microsoft programs practically in those endeavors. For example, some folks break down work into way too much detail and try to track it all in Project. This book explains how to figure out how far to break work down and where to store all the details that don't go into a PRoject schedule.

The book also includes tips for using Word, Excel, Access, and other programs in project management tasks. The book was published by Microsoft Press, hence the reference to Microsoft Project in the book title. I am sorry if the title is misleading--I can't do anything about that.

A difficult book to recommend
I bought this publication because 1) the price seemed reasonable and 2) it's often good to go back over familiar material and learn some new perspectives.
And, though I succeeded on point 1, I was generally disappointed with this publication which seems to be directed at new project managers and yet fails to convince that is has been edited with such an audience in mind.
The title - suggesting that Microsoft Project might get a strong focus - left me somewhat confused. The first 90 or so pages make little reference to Microsoft project and, when they do, do so in a way that suggests the author presupposes a fair degree of familiarity of Microsoft Project. This seems at odds with the previous text which is an almost simplistic view of project management basics.
The terminology seems loose, some of the early examples fail to illuminate the topic and the cartoons that accompnay the test create a 'home published' feel that I don't believe does Microsoft Press many favours.
Those expecting to find a gentle introduction to Microsoft Project will need to perservere beyond the initial chapters. And, even then, when Project is introduced it is done in such terms - without explanation - of "task view", "dependency links", etc which, although in themselves not a problem, are introduced without explanation and apparently with an assumption the reader will understand such terms.
These problems suggest (to me at least) some real problems with identifying the audience for the book: new PMs, experienced PMs but new to MS Project, or other. I was never sure.
This is the kind of book I would recommend to those with no experience in Project Management or MS project. And, if that desribes yourself, this book is a gentle introduction to the techniques of project management. Others familiar with Project management will find the introduction of little value and the segue into the details of MS project abrupt and assuming a familiarity that won't necessarily exist.

Whom it's for and for whom it's not...
Okay, let's be clear. If you already have been using MS Project and you understand the various processes of PM pretty well, you'll likely only get a few good tips to help you improve how you manage your projects and use of MS Project. But if like myself, you have been told here's a project for you and you have little to no project management training (other that your own good sense of how to plan, thus any mother or father could handle most projects! ;) ), this book is very helpful and especially so for gaining a quick sense of "I can do this!" and "I can do this with MS Project, Excel, Word, etc., the tools I many have already at work (or even with similar products like Open Office, etc.)

I purchased this book as part of a bundle (thus it was free) along with MS Project 2003 a few years ago and I still use it to help me understand certain aspects of project management (now that I'm finally really doing projects at work) where as I've hardly ever used the MS Project 2003 book (mainly because now I have the 2007 version and "Microsoft Project 2007, The Missing Manual" is a better aid for me (again someone who prefers simple, layman terminology to understand software even though I'm far from a beginner with using MS products).

So, again, if you're an IT tech-type or PM guru who's been using MS Project, already PM certified and prefer tekkie lingo when using a reference book to find a detailed way to solve a MS Project software problem you have, this is not the book for you. But for any newbies or immediate level users who want to understand the PM process and how and when a software tool (in particular MS software tools) can help you within that process, you should definitely try this book out. And hey, you can look at various online stores who offers a "pre-read" if you'd like to make sure before you purchase it!