A quick, comprehensive guide to successful project management.
Osman offers tips and strategies in this manual for project managers.
An experienced project manager who has worked on many construction sites, debut author Osman never uses the word “problem” for the hurdles that come up during the building process. He prefers the term “issues,” because to call something a problem is to expect someone else to solve it, and a project manager has no such luxury. With this book, Osman seeks to explain the role of the project manager and to offer strategies for those who fill that role. He has a favorite metaphor for his field: “the construction site itself can be seen as a kind of ‘delivery room.’ ” The building’s architect is the doctor; the client is the father; the contractor is the mother. The project manager, whose responsibilities are the focus of the book, is the equivalent of the delivery room nurse “in their ability to monitor events, and to identify issues that require immediate solutions, find those solutions, and implement them.” Osman includes basic managerial philosophies, such as the superiority of matrix team structures over traditional vertical management structures and the importance of hiring team members who are more knowledgeable than the project manager in their specific areas of expertise. He then runs through a series of situations in which various construction-related problems arise and walks the reader through ways to fix them. By keeping a cool head and falling back on fundamentals like foresight, planning, and creative thinking, a manager can always keep the project on schedule and on budget. Osman is a patient, lucid writer, explaining each point and scenario with clarity and examples. He perhaps leans a bit too heavily on his delivery-room metaphor (and even spends several pages early on musing on the metaphor’s limitations), but his advice is rational and easy to follow. The book is written specifically for project managers working in the construction industry, but the fundamental managerial skills are applicable in any situation that involves a large team and accountability to a third party. At about 100 pages, the book is concise and informative.
A quick, comprehensive guide to successful project management.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 107
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
