Book Summary

In the Artificial Intelligence era, emotional intelligence and people’s psychology are two of the top skills needed by project managers to manage their teams and project stakeholders successfully.

“Psychological Project Management” is written for Project Managers who want to motivate, educate,  eliminate the disruptive factors, and resolve conflicts between project teams to build a proper relationship inside the project team and empowers the project manager role.

In a fast-changing world and a complex industry like project management, new challenges frequently arise, and complex problems trigger creative thinking revealing new perspectives and opportunities. This book provides practical and creative methods & techniques for solving complex problems in the project management industry.

Many project managers have acquired methods & techniques through formal studies or work experience, and they are applied when faced with a challenging situation with the team in a project.  Indeed, these are all valuable and have THEIR PLACE. 

The lack of knowledge or experiences in using these tools & techniques in their right places or ignoring the importance of the psychological factors in managing a project will complicate the situation and lead to failing it.

In this book, Leif Rogell describes in-depth the importance of these factors (in project management) and how to take advantage of them to properly use the right tools & techniques to manage your project.

Book Evaluation

The style and the structure of the book are systematic, ordered and clear. This makes it easy to read and understand the ideas brought forth.

Leif did a great job by motivating the reader at the beginning of the book by choosing an amazing quote for the french writer “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry”. He continued his introduction in a preface presenting the importance of understanding the psychology of the project team to deal with all aspects of human behaviour within the project environment, and closing the introduction with the first chapter “1-Introduction: Project” of the book by pointing out what he considers to be the key takeaways.

At the same time, Leif closes his book with a hot topic that every project team is facing currently during the pandemic “Virtual Project Teams” highlighting the Challenges and providing recommendations for actions.

Regarding the content itself, the book provides a lot of interesting suggestions, advice, and tools that project managers could adopt with their teams to encourage their creativity.  

Despite that the author makes it clear in the title of the book “Psychological Project Management” that it is written primarily for project managers, you will find a lot of the suggestions relevant to entrepreneurs and managers to get a lot more practical results from the book.

The main takeaway from the book for me was the summary at the end of each chapter. It summarizes the main idea highlighted in the chapter to end up with a clear conclusion of the chapter. 

My recommendation

I give the work a high rating, as it had great points that every manager could use in their projects. I believe those in leadership & management positions could benefit from this book depending on the degree of which they think they could apply the suggestions to encourage creativity in their teams.  Thank you Leif for sharing all this information in one piece of work.