I bought Visualizing Project Management: Models and Frameworks for Mastering Complex Systems last year in Singapore. As many of your know I’m quite interested in relationship approaches to project management, and for that matter management in general. This book is quite good at revealing relationships between processes, often using a musical metaphor. For example, the authors compare a musical score with a plan, and then liken a project manager with a conductor. As a musician this resonated for me.

That said I have mixed feelings about the book. It is a useful complement to the PMBOK, and cross references both the PMBOK Guide and the INCOSE Handbook: I find this feature useful. It has lots of sidebars entries and quotes, which I found at times to be quite distracting. The visualisations, which were the real reason for buying the book, were a mixed bag. Some were very useful, others less so, and some I really didn’t understand.

The book gives an outline of some tools and techniques, such as the Cards on the Wall technique, which I have seen in used in knowledge management workshops. In essence it requires the project manager or the project team to stick cards to a wall and connect them with wool to reveal inter-dependencies and the workbreak breakdown structure. Other techniques, like earned value, are discussed in sufficient detail for a lay-person or new project manager to understand the concept, but I found myself wanting more.

So, all in all I think this book deserves a three-star rating, and is a useful addition to a new project manager’s library.

Regards Graham