How to Become a Project Manager? List of Useful Materials

Best Project Management Books

• "The One Minute Manager" - Ken Blanchard, Spencer Johnson. The book describes three practical management techniques, mastering which you can simplify your life and have much more time. This book has taught millions of Americans how to get rid of the difficulties and stresses of life, how to get more done with less time, and how to make peace with oneself. This book will definitely guide you in becoming a good project manager.
• "The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management" - Tom DeMarco. A good book for the basics on project management that everyone should read. This book will answer many questions such as: "how to choose the right person from the many candidates?", "what is the optimal number of people in a team at different stages of a project?", "how can you optimize your work if you are given tight deadlines?", etc. This book is one of the best project manager books to read.
• "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable" - Lencioni Patrick. This book is about how bad things really are on good teams and what to do about it. Why do the "five vices of the team" arise - mutual distrust, insubordination, irresponsibility, fear of conflict, and indifference to results, how to diagnose them, and what to do about them? If you have been looking for the best books on project management, this book certainly deserves your attention.
• "Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time" - Jeffrey Sutherland. A story about the "Scrum" methodology from its founder. You will learn about the methodology and how it came to be. The unique Scrum methodology breaks the stereotypes of the old project management methodology. If you have decided to become an IT project manager, then knowledge of Scrum technology will be useful to you. Its basis is a team with an extraordinary sense of purpose, self-organized and self-managed.
• "The ONE Thing" - Gary Keller, Jay Papasan. Gary Keller and Jay Papasan's book is a bestseller by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and USA Today. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to become a successful project manager. This book will help you focus on the most important things in your life. You need to do less. You need to be less distracted, spend less time on secondary things, and make fewer unrealistic commitments. This is the best project management book for those who would like to stop wasting time on secondary things.
• "Project Management for The Unofficial Project Manager" - Kory Kogon. These days, managers, in addition to their main job, have to lead and complete complex and numerous projects using limited resources. This is one of the best business books for project managers to read for project managers who manage several projects at once. In this book, the authors describe the principles, practical examples and tools of real and highly effective project management that can be used in any level of organization.
• "Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business" - Sunil Gupta. In our list of top 10 good project management books, this book deserves special attention. For the past decade, Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta has studied Fortune 500 companies and how they have transformed in the digital age. Gupta provides detailed case studies to provide practical and actionable advice on the road to inevitable digitization.
• "Software Project Management For Dummies" - Luckey Teresa, Phillips Joseph. This is the best book to learn software project management. The daily evolution of IT technology is an important reason for project managers to quickly learn how to manage software projects. The authors of the book describe basic methodologies for managing software projects, from managing programmers to assessing and eliminating risks of software development. Reading this book is the best way to become a good software project manager. The book covers the iterative development model and various methodologies such as software lifecycle management, open source, eXtreme, SQA testing and others. Every project manager working for an IT company should read this book.
• "Advanced Multi-project Management: Achieving Outstanding Speed and Results with Predictability" - Gerald I. Kendall, Kathleen M. Austin. In this book, the authors presented a modern approach to effective project management of multiple projects. By reading this book, you will be able to increase the number of projects you work on simultaneously and complete them faster. The book also discusses the key problems that professional project managers often face. After reading this book, you will be able to complete projects without being late or over budget, as well as without reducing the original scope of work.
• "Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management" - Scott Berkun. We couldn't help but include this book in our top 10 books to become a better project manager. The author of the book offers a collection of essays on proven in practice strategies for defining, leading, and managing projects. Each essay transforms complex problems into practical advice for project managers. Using his extensive experience, the author explains what should be done to complete large website development projects or software solutions.

Best YouTube Channels for Project Management

• ProjectManager - this is the most popular channel about project management, online marketing, business systems, automation, training. If you were looking for which project management YouTube channels to watch to improve your skills, then this channel will certainly help you.
• Proper Project Management - channel with videos on product and project management, a lot of useful material.
• Association for Project Management - videos with knowledge on Project Management. Live tips from practice, explains in plain language how it really works as a Project Manager.
• Teamwork - An educational platform, train specialists project managers from scratch and help them work their way through from mastering to entering a new job 😊.
• LEARN PROJECT MANAGEMENT - This is one of the best YouTube channels for project management. The channel was created to help you become a successful product manager. For the author of the channel it is important to speak in simple words, deliver the essence and fight against nerdiness.
• The Digital Project Manager - Training for project managers, lessons for beginners.

Tips to Become a Better Project Manager

1. Practice Active Listening

You need to be prepared to listen carefully to what stakeholders and team members have to say. Practice your active listening skills. Being able to analyze information and read between the lines can be of great help to you. You can miss out on a lot of essential and valuable things if you don't pay proper attention to what stakeholders or your team members say. Active listening is one of the important ways to become a better project manager.

2. Always Know the Status of the Project

Project manager should always be aware of everything that happens at each stage of project development. A truly good project manager must be aware of both the day-to-day and overall progress of a project, and always be ready to report on any project development issues. The project manager should periodically check the progress of the project development, identify potential problems, their possible solutions and summarize the results at each stage of product development.

3. Analyze Your Mistakes

Among other tips for project managers, this one is the most important. Everyone who wants to become a successful project manager must be able to analyze his mistakes. It is significant to learn from your mistakes and not make them again. We recommend project managers to analyze the mistakes made and understand how they occurred. Analyze why the mistakes occurred, how they affected the development of your project, and what was done to solve these problems. We also recommend discussing mistakes with the project team, so they can also understand them and stop making them in the future.

4. Learn to Use Project Management Software Tools

Project management software tools can be difficult to learn and use for novice project managers. But don't underestimate project management tools because they increase the efficiency of your work. You must learn project management materials about tools at least on a basic level and use them in practice.

5. Ask Until you Understand

As a project manager, you must ask all important questions about the project. Any miscommunication between functional departments and project managers can lead to costly mistakes in project development. You must find out who will be affected by the project, what are the goals of the project, what are the expectations from the project, who is the target audience, and so on.

6. Search for the Root of the Problem

Many inexperienced project managers focus on eliminating the consequences of a problem, but not on finding the cause. With this approach, issues will arise again. If you want to become a great project manager, you need to get rid of the root cause of the issues to prevent them from happening again. Issues can be either failures in communication or unrealistic expectations of the project, your task is to understand what exactly is the source of the difficulties. Identifying the root cause of issues is sure to help you in future stages of project development.

7. Automate the Development Process

If during product development you notice that your team repeats the same actions, think about how you can automate and systematize them. To automate project development you can use software, outsourcing, task delegation and other methods. If you find it difficult to automate the development process, we recommend examining the materials for project manager on this topic. Automation is important because by saving time on performing the same tasks, your team will be able to focus on the really complex and most important work.

8. Communicate Clearly

If you want to become the best project manager, you need to learn how to communicate clearly. Communication is the basis for successful project development. With the proper communication, you can steer the development of your project in the right direction. Moreover, proper communication provides the structure for fast, reliable and efficient completion of a project.

9. Define the Key Requirements

Before starting project development, the project manager should outline the key requirements for the project. Requirements can vary, such as project schedule, resource requirements, project deliverables, client management, and more. By making a list of the key requirements of the project before you start developing it, you can eliminate any inconsistencies.

10. Make Sure Everyone Agrees With the Plan

You need to make sure that all your team members and clients understand and agree with the product development plan. If there are any questions or objections, you need to give a clear explanation and resolve the situation for all parties to be satisfied. If you don't make sure the parties agree on the development of the project, the client may start to deviate from the plan.