Poised Solutions Tech Library

The Mythical Man Month

The Mythical Man Month Author: Frederick P. Brooks Jr. Publisher: Addison-Wesley Published: 1995 Pages: 322

The Mythical Man Month is the classic book on project management, if you only ever read one book on project management then The Mythical Man Month is the book to read. Quite, simply the The Mythical Man Month is the best book on Project Management you can find.

Technical projects are hard to achieve well, the success of a project is based largely on how realistic your expectations and plans are to the true state of affairs. Problems are problems they are not challenges, and by keeping a true perspective on things projects can be achieved in budget, but being optimistic or pessimistic is the route of failure for most Information Technology projects. Optimism is often the mistake du jour, the reason for this is more projects get the go ahead on optimism, whereas pessimism often means a project will not even be attempted. Realism is where projects succeed though. It is often worse to waste money on optimism then it is to never have spent with pessimism, but realism is the best where only the truly profitable projects are enacted.

The Mythical Man Month concerns itself mainly with false optimism how to recognise it and counter it. Simple things in Technology always take a longer than expected and truly complex elements take an awfully long time to prove, and produce. By under estimating the difficulties that lie ahead in a project, most projects run over budget and destroy morale. The Mythical Man Month is mythical in that it takes a lot longer than a month to do most things, and to expect otherwise is just plain foolhardiness and often justs wastes others time and resource.

The Mythical Man Month Chapters

The Mythical Man Month Chapters

1. The Tar Pit
2. The Mythical Man Month
3. The Surgical Team
4. Aristocracy, Democracy and System Design
5. The Second System Effect
6. Passing the Word
7. Why Did the Tower of Babel Fail?
8. Calling the Shot
9. Ten Pounds in a Five-Pound Sack
10. The Documentary Hypothesis
11. Plan to Throw One Away
12. Sharp Tools
13. The Whole and the Parts
14. Hatching a Catastrophe
15. The Other Face
16. No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accident
17. "No Silver Bullet" Refired
18. Propositions of the Mythical Man Month: True or False?
19. The Mythical Man Month after 20 Years

The Mythical Man Month Appendices

1. Epilogue
2. Notes and References
3. Index

The Mythical Man Month overall just tells it as it is, it is a straight talking book. The ideas are often resisted by the uninitiated, and then later found to be true, as the uninitiated becomes the novice. The gung ho are quickly brought into check when faced with the reality of most technical projects, and it is perhaps best that people know ahead of time that technical projects are hard, and to program computer systems is probably one of the most complex things to do on the planet. If you look at the state of software, on the whole it is pretty abysmal, there are some excellent examples of great software, but it is by far in the minority, and if you examine the amount of programming time spent on that software you will find the investment huge. Only a fool thinks programming is easy.