Best Project Management Books: Your Step-stones to Success

Of all my project management books, this is the fundamental one. I designed it to take a beginer to a good level of competence, in eight easy steps.

So instead of telling you what I think, here is what Anne-Marie O’Hara, Head of Projects at The National Trust for Scotland, said:

"Read this book, follow his advice and you will succeed.’"

In my opinion, this is the next best of the lightweight mass market trade paperbacks about project management. It has all the basics written clearly in bite-sized chunks.

Rather than follow a project lifecycle approach (like How to Manage a Great Project), this project management book focuses on the key skills you need to focus on, to deliver a successful project.

This book places its emphasis firmly on managing your projects through people.

And it is also distinctive on this list for being focused mainly on digital project management - but not about 'how to be agile'. 

It's full of good sense, practical advice, and engaging anecdotes.

I’ll admit it… For years, I held out against Dummies books for, well, snobbish reasons. I’m not a Dummy.

But this book, like its modern stable mates, does not treat you like a dummy.

I don’t usually like nor recommend self-published, Kindle-only books. But I will make an exception for this well-written ebook.

It is written in a personal, first person style that you may or may not like, but it is full of good pragmatic advice, clearly explained.

This is a project management book that was recommended by OnlinePMCourses reader, Angus Duncan in his comment to the previous version of this article. I have taken a look at this book, though not thoroughly. And I was impressed.

It takes a similar, lifecycle approach to How to Manage a Great Project. It is written for a slightly more experienced reader, but I think it still fits with this group, rather than the next.

Because...

I wrote this book to match this niche.

After 20 years of training new project managers, I know what ways of explaining things work. And I have turned those live courses into a book.

You'll find it:

• Easy to read
• Covers all the ground you need
• Solid theory with practical advice

The title is a metaphor for the challenges of project management. The book’s principal author, Dan Bradary, has clearly been around the block a few times (he’s a PMP with 30 years’ experience when he wrote the book).

So Herding Chickens tackles some of the thorny challenges project managers face day-to-day. And he offers a range of valuable insights drawing on a wide range of ideas and models. His is an approach very similar to mine: read widely, learn from anything, draw it into your practice to test it out, then pass it on if it works.

If you want to self-coach, to become a better PM, and are prepared to put in the work of doing her exercises, Susanne offers a great book. It is one of those project management books you are likely to return to at different stages of your career. She comes from a business project background.

Declaration: this is another one of mine.

This books has three parts.

1. The first looks at the four essentials of team leadership in a project context, and offers a wealth of tools and tips for each. 
2. Part 2 sets out the things you need to do to move from project manager to project leader, in each of the four primary project stages.
3. And finally, the last part offers tips and tools for a project leader who needs to deal with tough times – which you will do one day.

This comes highly recommended to me as a book full of experience around making the basics of project management work in a challenging corporate environment.

The focus is on pragmatism and it's full of anecdotes and ideas.

As the title suggests, this book has a strategic focus - and one around meeting organizational goals. 

This book has a lot in it - tools, methods, insights. It will help you graduate to a broader perspective on your project management.

This is another of my own books, but I firmly believe it is the best introductory level project risk management book out there.

It’s written for early-stage project managers who want to go beyond the hour or so of coverage the subject got in their project management training. And it is stuffed full of tables, tools, and diagrams to make a tricky subject easy to understand and practical to implement.

This new edition is revised and enlarged with new content.

This is the intermediate volume between Risk Happens! (above) and Effective Risk Management (in Part 4, below). It’s a big read with more detail than the former. But it is far less rigorous and technical than the latter.

I love Kendrick’s telling of the story of the Panama canal, as the end piece to each chapter.

This is a brand new book and it is clearly (to me) the best simple introduction to Stakeholder Engagement you can buy

It provides all the resources you need, to understand the process and take it on confidently.

This is the fourth (and last) of my own project management books that I am listing. And I think it’s the best.

It is a comprehensive guide to project stakeholder engagement. It avoids proprietary models and cover a huge range of ideas: from stakeholder analysis techniques to persuasive writing, to behavioral economics, to stakeholder campaign management. This is a topic with a paucity of decent books, so this one fills a big gap. It will also give you a three page history of the concept of a stakeholder!

This is not the book if you want a rigorous text on applying Agile to your projects. But, if you want an easy-to-read introduction that will leave you feeling fully familiar with the principles and practices of Agile, it’s a great book.

Chuck Cobb is a good friend of OnlinePMCourses, and if you want to learn Agile Project Management, then we recommend his courses.

But we choose our friends carefully. Chuck knows his stuff and has a highly pragmatic approach to Agile, which allows you to adopt it at any level from the local to the enterprise, and in any degree of rigor, from pure Scrum through to an adaptive blend of methodologies.

Frankly, this is a love-it or hate-it book that makes the case for Scrum by one of the founders. Don't expect to learn as much about how to practice Scrum.

It's self-serving and insightful by degrees. Buy with caution. Not everyone will like this. Just take a look at the Amazon reviews!

Because...

If you aren't yet aware of the basics of Agile, you need to be. And this book makes it easy to absorb them.

Do also look at our roadmap and resource guide: I Want to Study Agile Project Management, here on this site.

Here’s a book with one of the most self-effacing subtitles: ‘some keys to success’. It hides the fact that this is the book you go to when you want an authoritative guide to project risk management… and you are prepared to put the work in.

This is not an easy book. But it is well written and, if you are a serious PM who needs to manage risk rigorously on major projects, it’s the book for you.

Every now and then, I read a book I really wish I had written. And this is one.

Todd Williams's approach is very much like mine and this is a heavy book that goes into his ideas in great detail. But don't think it's full of padding: just the opposite. You'll find plenty of gold-dust in here.

Todd's writing is clear, if dense in ideas. And those ideas are fundamental. You will want to return to this book as your career develops.

This is a truly exceptional project management book, and one for pride of place in your library... After you have read it thoroughly and covered it in sticky notes and underlines!

If you need to understand the business aspects of capital projects, then this is the book for you.

It presents lots of data to help understand why large projects succeed... or fail.

My original copy is the third edition and 20 years old. But this was my reference manual when I was learning, so I can heartily recommend the latest edition. It’s a textbook, so you get a huge amount of content, lots of detail and, whilst easily readable, it ain’t reading-for-pleasure.

But if you’re a serious student of PM, or you want a good solid reference book on your shelves, to see you through years of ‘let me just look that up‘, then you’ll want this.

As a text book, it's very pricey. So, maybe save some money by picking up a second hand 7th or 8th edition. For me, this is one of my truly indispensible project management books. I recently upgraded to a 7th edition at a very low cost.

A lighter-weight text book than its cousin (above). I haven’t seen it, but this may suit you as a halfway house (though it’s priced a little beyond half way).

Textbook pricing is shocking (and arguably unethical). And, for reasons I cannot fathom, the 6th Edition is currently not on sale as a print copy in the UK Amazon.

Again, consider a second-hand copy of an earlier edition - mine is the 3rd Ed.

Because...

This is a book full of references. It's deeply flawed in some ways, but its mission is sound: to guide you in career-long professional development.