October 4, 2010 Book Reviews
So yesterday (ok today) in the evening (ok night) I finished reading yet another book on management, this time it is called “The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management”.All things are happening in some post-Soviet-Union country, and it turns out that main thing that country does is software development. Hero of the book is lack to be there and lead 6 projects, which of them has deadline. Ugly boss is trying to shorten dates of releases, but fortunately hero has lot of connections to get world-known experts in different areas, also he has lot of people, so he decided to have 3 team for each of the project to be able to experiment and see how different factors impact productivity of the team, for example size of the team.
I read this book, and you know what? I’m disappointed by it. I has lot of ideas that do NOT glue with current world Agile ideas. Book states that everything should be designed and specified up to smallest details and after that developers start code. Also as one of improvements of the process was to omit unit testing o_O. Regardless of this I liked ideas about how managers should deal with people, bosses, deadlines, team sizes.About team sizes: If team is huge it will not lead to good design or effective utilization of resources – it will lead to enormous amount of meetings, discussions, etc, and in the end you could even get worse results!
Book is very naive, but I agree that it was initial intent of the author to write about known to all of us things on Project Management and they could be solved. He described main issues that may happen when you deal with Deadline. Honestly, it looks like he was asleep and had this dream, and then quickly wrote it down :)
If you have time and like to read something before bed you may read it, but I wish I had not spent my time on this book.
6 comments
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Hm, it is strange that I haven't found such disappointing things that you pointed out. Will try to refresh it soon. In general this is one of the best books I've read about Project Management.
Did you read "The goal" or "BOSS" ?
So "The goal" is book which I liked the most of all of the books on management that I had chance to read. But, yeah, I did not read many of them. Maybe will put comparison table when have many of the in list.
I like this book, i agree it is a bit 'simple' but it still have value and talks to a ton of things that happens in the real world.
You are right that it talks about things that happens in the real world, of course that is expressed in 'simple' and as per me somewhat naive way… Maybe I should reevaluate it in my mind. :)
How about book proposing to omit Unit Testing? Yeah… I understand that this book is kind of old book and talk about waterfall, I guess… but isn't it something… Am I ok to spend my time on this?