For me, THE most influential book of the first half of 2008 is definitely "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Craig Janet reminded my with his post yesterday of this book, and the fact that it was due time to give it also some blog time on Project Shrink.

Photography by JL2003.

When you have seen only white swans in your life, you think "all swans are white". But it might be that you haven't seen every swan on the planet yet, and that a black swan exists, but only that it is very rare. Taleb defines a "Black Swan" as an highly unlikely event, but with an enormous impact when it occurs.
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The following books influenced me the most this year:

• Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
• A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield
• Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5 by Timothy Ferriss
• The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent by Richard Florida
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
• Social Blueprints: Conceptual Foundations of Sociology by David K. Brown
• Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development by James O. Coplien and Neil B. Harrison

Work moves around. If it can be produced cheaper, more efficiently or better, it gets relocated.

Talent moves around. If one area on the globe is more exciting and thrilling than another, people relocate.

Works moves around. And people that perform the work move around. Not necessarily dependent of each other.

Regional population changes rapidly. Asia gets a booming population growth. First world nations have a enormous amount of seniors coming towards them as the babyboomers are getting old. With regional changes in the populations, the demand for work shifts.

Nobody can tell you how the patterns will turn out. Where will be what. Who will get what.

One thing will be sure, it will be global, spread out, and on the move!

That is the vivid image I got from The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent by Richard Florida.

Oh yeah… and if you want to attract talent, you have to provide a tolerant and creative society… duh!

Welcome to Amsterdam …

Bill Dow and Bruce Taylor have worked four years to bring us the "Project Management Communications Bible". This book about the most important aspect of Project Management will be available in the first quarter of 2008 and will contain over 1200 pages! Wow. I had a great chat with both of them about their upcoming book, the past and future of Project Management, and a lot of other great topics.

How To Write 1200+ Pages…

Bas: There was one thing that amazed me a lot, how do you write 1,200 pages about project management communication?

Bill: It was actually very easy. We actually had to cut down on some of the tools because we started out with 107 communication tools, and if you do an average of about five pages per tool, and the way weve written the book - we have a section that shows how the tools are used on the nine Project Management Institute knowledge areas. And each tool we felt would cover basically the scope, the planning and that type of thing.
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Managing Agile Projects is a book edited by Kevin Aguanno, a noted speaker and educator on agile project management. It describes techniques for managing projects in environments where the scope is constantly changing. This book is about techniques common to nearly all of the agile development methods (Extreme Programming, Scrum, Feature Driven Development, DSDM, Lean Development, Crystal Methods, Agile Software Development, Agile Project Management, etc.) that you can use to reduce risk, improve quality, and dramatically increase customer satisfaction in high-change projects. Chapters were written by the gurus of the agile movement: Scott Ambler, Alistair Cockburn, Ron Jeffries, and many others.

All author royalties from this book will be going to the International Red Cross for disaster relief.

A good time for me to have an interview with the editor. 

There are not many books available that cover the topic of when to apply an agile or plan driven method. In my opinion the selection of when to apply a certain technique or process component remains the most difficult area of Project Management. I only know of two books that cover this in detail, my own and "Balancing Agility And Discipline" by Barry Boehm and Richard Turner.

First of all, the fact that the book is written by Boehm and Turner is remarkable. Boehm wrote the classic "Software Engineering Economics", formulated Theory-W, invented the spiral model, a true influential pioneer. Turner helped shape the CMMI model. So, both respected "old school" software engineering professionals. The fact that they try to have an impartial look at agile is an accomplishment on its own.

The book provides insights in when to apply agile methods and when to apply plan-driven methods. The authors argue that for every type there is a kind of project that is suited for one of the approaches. Or a kind of combination.

Five factors are considered influential when considering an approach:

• Critically: if the end result doesn't work, are people going to die or is it a minor inconvenience?
• Personnel: how good are your people?
• Dynamism: are requirements changing all over the place?
• Culture: do people like change or do they need order?
• Size: how many people are involved in the project?

Presented is a risk-driven approach to select the proper method. Some general project environment risks (E) are considered, risks associated with the use of agile methods (A) and risks that occur when plan-driven methods (P) are used. An assessment of these risks should help you to make a proper choice of method.

The risks are:

• E-Tech: Technology uncertainties.
• E-Coord: A lot of stakeholders to coordinate.
• E-Complex: The complexity of the system.
• A-Scale: Scalability and critically.
• A-YAGNI: Use of simple design or YAGNI (You Aint Gonna Need It).
• A-Churn: Personnel turn-over and churn.
• A-Skill: Not enough people skilled in agile methods.
• P-Change: Rapid change.
• P-Speed: Need for rapid results.
• P-Emerge: Emergent requirements.
• P-Skill: Not enough people skilled in plan-driven methods.

What I find very useful is the appendix with a comparison of a lot of methods like Scrum, RUP, Crystal, CMMI etc.

Although the book is very dry, although you don't get a ready recipe for success (duh!), this book will make your mind better suited for balancing different methods.