Any good resources for learning Software Project Management? | Hacker News Reader

Any good resources for learning Software Project Management?

10 pointsmomojo4 comments

As a young software engineer who's interested in leading a project in the future, are there any good resources for diving in at a beginner's level? Preferably a book, not an entire course. But any suggestions are welcome

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Some of my favorite books around managing software projects and technical leadership:

    * The Manager's Path - read the chapter on being a Tech Lead
    * Making Work Visible
    * Accelerate

My website has more book reviews on this topic: https://www.briansnotes.io/audience/tech-lead/

Anything focusing on Lean Software Development and/or Agile. As much hate those words bring up in people that have had bad experiences and bad management of those processes, the alternatives of waterfall are much worse for software. There are exceptions like if you’re building software for a nuclear reactor or high risk projects you’ll want very stringent requirements processes.

The core concepts behind agile/lean are really geared towards minimizing churn on stuff that doesn’t matter (unimportant features) and having a short feedback loop so you can find issues faster. Nothing is perfect and you will still have unused features and bugs, that’s the nature of it. One of the books I read had research backed findings based on analysis of projects, I think it was Agile Project Management with Scrum. Rework and other books by the Basecamp founders are good. It’s good to read up on a few different ways people have successfully done things to get perspective that not everything is “one size fits all.” Don’t take any methodology or process as prescriptive, they all have trade offs.

Have you looked at project management certificates? There's IPMA [1] and PMI [2], for example. IPMA Level D is about basic skills necessary for project management and the organization provides a 1.500 page textbook.

[1] https://www.ipma.world/ [2] https://www.pmi.org/certifications/project-management-pmp

Edit: As an afterthought, there's only so much you can lern from a book. I guess in project management, nothing beats experience.

High Output Management, by Andy Grove.

"A Manager's Output = The output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence."

You won't walk away with tactics, but the book will help get you in the right mindset.

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