100 Project Management Insider Tips by Patrick Rayes is a short business management help book jam packed with useful tips that will predominantly serve project managers. That said, there are snippets of information and uses that will serve administrators in other fields or people performing ad-hoc projects within their role simply because it is largely talking about organizational skills and best practice.
The blurb promises to present a book that provides insider tips that are not taught on any project management course. For a large part, this is true, although not completely. As a project manager myself, and someone that has attended a few courses on the subject, I can confirm that there is information within this book that should be familiar to learners. For example, it talks about creating mission statements and risk plans which are things that are created before the final project is even accepted as part of testing for viability. There are also quite a few tips that largely overlap other tips, perhaps in different sections of the book. As such, the number of insider tips could probably be reduced to nearer 70-75.
Chapter one is less a chapter and more an introduction. It shares no tips and serves merely to explain what to expect over the remaining chapters. The book really gets started in what Rayes titles Chapter 2: Communication. Additional chapters include methodology, people (as in human resources), process, technology, and other tips. The signposting is helpful because although the book can be read cover to cover in under an hour, for people on the job wanting to improve in a specific area, they can flip to the irrelevant chapter and spend ten minutes perusing the relevant source material. What’s also helpful about this book and universal to many office roles are the numerous software that Rayes mentions such as MS Teams, MS Project, Google Workspace, and Trello. The book also contains links to further information such as https://financesonline.com/list-of-project-management-methodologies-comparison-examples/.
As a beginner project manager, the book serves as a companion reminding the manager of important documents and processes to put in place as well as introducing some new practices that seem like common sense to someone in the business but could easily be taken for granted. Even for someone that is only completing a mini project within their main role, there are enough concepts mentioned to help the employee research how to get started. The overall presentation is useful. The tips are provided in a uniform way where the reader is told what the tip is, how to apply it, and in many cases, given additional notes of interest. Therefore, if we consider this book to be aimed at newbies, concise and professionally structured, with flawless editing, and containing an assortment of novel ideas, the 4 out of 5 stars rating is well deserved.
