The importance of project management skills

I am on holiday and still reading books about project management – well, to be fair, this book was a pdf that I downloaded from the lazy project manager (www.lazyprojectmanager.co.uk); it only cost £3.50 with the proceeds donated to Cancer Research UK. The book is a collection of lots of short stories about project management. Actually they are each a mini 'lesson learnt' and 'food for thought'. As with all advice the bits you remember are those most relevant to the projects you are currently involved in. Peter tells a lovely story about a warning light on his car dashboard and the project dashboard that his PMO uses to control over 250 projects simultaneously. I am currently managing a portfolio of over 40 projects and am well aware of how difficult it is to balance the need for reporting to satisfy my project sponsorship responsibilities with the need to minimise the amount of reporting that my project managers do so that they can get on with the real work. I also really enjoyed Peter's views on the contribution that project management makes to industry and the results of his survey assessing the importance of project management skills to career progression. To be honest, I probably enjoyed this bit of the book because it endorses some of the things that I have been writing about this year:

(http://www.mavencapability.co.uk/downloads/Building-Capability-Whitepaper-1-July-2010.pdf)

Let me know if you download this book from Peter’s site and what your favourite stories were.

Happy New Year