I'm a design engineer for a very small company (7 employees). We are owned by a larger company (150 employees) that handles accounting and HR so we are 7 employees focused on producing our products.
The college I graduated from, while in excellent in technical engineering education, covered Project Management in about a day saying that there are these various styles out there and may have mentioned AGILE. I've realized for some time now that I am woefully ignorant in project management and would like to self educate to add these skills to better manage our design projects.
To that end I am looking for a handful of resources that I can begin reading to implement PM in my organization. I was looking at PMBOK 6th ed then saw they have 7th out and have seen some controversy as to which should be used. Also if AGILE is right for our group, I'll have to pick up a book on that (I saw a lot of references to the AGILE Practice Guide).
This brings me to another question, I've noticed a handful of different PM formats, AGILE or SCRUM to name a couple. To give some background to help taylor the suggestions, our company designs and manufactures valves and pumps. The valves are relatively low quantity - high quality 1-3 thousand a year ($1-$4 thousand each), the pumps are very low quantity - high quality 10-100 a year ($35-$50 thousand each). So far the pump side of the business has not added to the lineup since 2010, the valves are a new market for us and we have released 7 new products in 7 years. Saving Changes...
I recommend Rita Mulcahy's certification prep, it's a good option to acquire PM Knowledge at your own pace, and is updated to the latest exam. Visit this link:
https://rmcls.com/about/rita-mulcahy Saving Changes...
I'd steer clear of any certification-related content for the near term as it won't really help in the near term.
Rather than reading a book, if there is budget, you might benefit more from a good foundational PM course (3-5 days) covering the key knowledge areas with lots of hands on practice.
Thank you all for the input. I will probably have to look into a 3-5 day course. I recently found the white paper https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/...hite-paper.pdf. I look forward to reading it as it looks exactly up my allly. Saving Changes...
"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious and immature."
