Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects

This is a very easy to read book with practical advice.

Many practical examples to start and/or improve managenwnt of a project portfolio using proven Agile practices.

Johanna Rothman’s “Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity to Finish More Projects” (Second Edition) is a project management book that is mostly geared toward the IT industry. Even so, it reminded me of the days when I worked for BT/MCI as a Project Coordinator and we had several international projects going on at once. No matter what kind of industry you are in, you will probably find the techniques that Rothman discusses useful on some level. I am not in telecommunications any longer, but I found the suggestions helpful in helping me to better manage my own media projects.Johanna Rothman gives clear instructions and good advice for:* Setting up a project portfolio from first drafts to organizing it* Ranking the projects within the portfolio* Collaboration between team members and other coordinating teams to deliver milestones.Rothman also gives great advice on when and how to kill doomed projects or transform them into something more effective. I could really identify with some of the stories that Rothman shared throughout the book, having seen my own teammates and project managers go through some of the same issues. Technology may have changed and we may be doing far more with smaller teams, the issues of keeping it all straight and managing deliverables is still the same.

"Manage Your Project Portfolio" is a good read for anyone wanting to improve their project management skills in, as the title suggests, rank ordering projects the manager is involved in. The book is around 200 pages and covers such topics as:1. Definition of a project portfolio.2. Various ways multitasking is overrated (I say "Amen" to that!).3. Deciding whether to kill, commit to, or transform a project.4. Various methods of rank ordering your projects.5. Building trust in your team.6. What a parking lot is and how to use it.7. Working with team members and other people in the organization on a project.8. Various aspects of a mission.The book is very readable and smoothly transitions from topic to topic. Will be a good reference for current and future projects.

I am a professional project manager and have been for years. This book has good content (I skimmed it only) and the author is well-known in both the traditional and agile spaces. Unfortunately, I found that this book didn't meet my needs so it's been on my shelf for literally years now.

This is very useful and will help you finish projects, but the main ideas can be summarized in about half as many pages. There is a fair bit of overlap across chapters and many ideas are found in scrum and kanban from them same published (I love this publisher).

Project management is a huge scope to be covered in a book like this.In one sentence what this book really does: It helps you think in a structured manner about Project, Program, Portfolio - general guidelines for managing them.It is necessary for people starting on project management to study this and will even help seasoned project managers to read this to refresh and re-think some of their strategies.While the focus is on IT project management - some of the principles can be applied to other projects as well.

Author Rothman asks a really strong question: how much time to you spend working effectively and how much time to you spend coping with emergencies? And, perhaps even more importantly, how much time do you spend "mutitasking" inefficiently? Doing a little of this and a little of that?I think this book does a very good -- but not great -- job of providing you with the tools to tackle these complex problems.The author argues that "lean and agile" management in these situations means that you need to understand the mission of each project without getting side-tracking by mission "buzz words." Well, ok. I get that. Although that strategy doesn't provide me with the problem-solving that I personally need.So, I ultimately came down to this...1. I admire that this is a pragmatic book2. It is fairly jargon-free. And short!3. You can skim it, see the problems that it discusses that you frequently encounter, and get some insight.4. But. This is a system. "Create these piles...put post-its here and here" etc.5. Her solutions aren't my solutions. In fact, I think this book might be designed for Project Managers who are not so good at Managing Project.

I'm currently the Scrum Master for a number of teams who consistently struggled with a Sprint Goal as there was simply too much work in the system.We were working on mulitple projects and features with changing priorities and never really finishing anything.The book was easy to read and digest and worked through the reasons for a lean project portfolio and more importantly how to slowly introduce it within your organisation.Highly recommenced for anyone struggling with multiple projects within an agile and lean environment