Wondering what makes a successful project manager? Experienced project managers will tell you, it takes a lot of putting your neck on the line. From budgeting to strong organizational and interpersonal skills, these are just a few of the abilities you need to manage teams and lead them to success. And today, managing projects isn’t just limited to those with the title of “Project Manager.” Many roles now require you to coordinate people and resources to get things up and running. Thankfully, there are plenty of resources out there to help you learn these skills or sharpen what you already know. This article highlights the best project management books, chosen based on the biggest challenges project managers face and how well these books help you tackle them. This article covers:
- Issues that Project Managers Face
- Top Project Management Book Recommendations
- Bonus Project Management Books
Issues that Project Managers Face
While project management is a rewarding job, it isn’t always the easiest to execute. Projects can face delays or even fail, and it’s the manager’s responsibility to get them back on track. Below, we highlight some key aspects of project management that project managers struggle with. By overcoming these challenges, you’ll become more effective in your project management role.
Keeping Teams on One System
Teams that use one management system experience smoother collaboration, better visibility of tasks, and fewer delays.
But having one central platform isn’t enough. Teams also need to know how to use it effectively. Even with the right tool, some teams struggle because individuals haven’t been properly trained, haven’t tested the system, or don’t use it consistently. Over time, this leads to confusion and inefficiencies. A strong project manager ensures that team members have access to one simple, unified tool and understand how to use it to support the team’s goals.
Lack of Clear Goals & Objectives
As a project manager, one of the most important things you can do is to develop clear goals and objectives for your project. If a project manager and their team do not know what the end goal is, then their performance, and ultimately, their ability to deliver results, goes down the drain.
Take this example: you’re tasked with developing a fitness app for your organization. But you’re unclear about what the app’s core functionality should be. You vaguely know you actually want users to be able to set daily fitness targets and sync the app with popular fitness devices. However, without clarity, your team could head in totally different directions, some might focus on social features, others on diet tracking, and others on intense workout planning
Frequent Changes to Scope
Imagine being deep into a project and then your client suddenly decides to change the requirements. You now have to reevaluate your resources, and get the team on board with the new changes. This can easily lead to delays in delivery, and clients aren’t always thrilled about that. You have to know how to manage change while still keeping both your team and your clients in high spirits.
Weak Soft Skills
Over two decades ago, PM Network identified weak soft skills as one of the top reasons project managers fail – guess what, it still rings true today. Soft skills are essential for motivating and leading others to deliver successful projects. These include communication, decision-making, motivation, conflict management, and relationship building, to name a few.
On the other hand, signs of weak soft skills include hesitating to ask for help, avoiding constructive feedback, fearing escalation, or delaying key project management practices.
Inadequate Team Skills
In the professional world, you’ve probably heard the saying: “Bad input equals bad output.” This simple idea holds true for project teams as well. Even if you check all the other boxes to ensure a successful project, for example, there are enough resources, you’ve set clear goals, etc., the project will fail if your team lacks the right skills. Project managers must carefully consider both the project’s needs and the human skills required to succeed.
Team Work Challenges
Sometimes, personalities clash, responsibilities aren’t clearly defined, or team members just aren’t aligned. This creates friction, delays, and frustration. As a project manager, you need to step in early, facilitate honest conversations, assign clear roles, and encourage a team mindset.
Unrealistic Deadlines
Impossible deadlines are one of the biggest headaches in project management, and they usually come from not having clear goals in the first place. Deadlines are supposed to help break a project down and track real progress. When you create unrealistic timelines, you’re not just hurting the project, you’re killing team morale, too. Then, before you know it, your timeline, budget, and sanity are all out the window.
Resources Deprivation
A 2023 RGPM survey found that 44.39% of project managers see a lack of resources as their biggest concern. An organization might have big goals, but that doesn’t mean they enough capability to achieve them. For example, a startup may want to build a full AI-powered assistant to compete with Siri or ChatGPT, but without the right team or funding, it’s not realistic. This puts pressure on the project manager and affects the whole project, like missing deadlines or lowering quality. Project managers need a variety of skills to handle this, like being able to talk to stakeholders, or find ways to stretch resources, or get additional funding.
Poor Risk Management
Imagine being told it will rain, but not leaving your home with a raincoat or umbrella to shield you from it. Just like checking the weather forecast to avoid mishaps, in project management, you need to identify potential threats beforehand. Once you identify potential threats, whether financial, legal, strategic, or security-related, you plan accordingly. This includes choosing the right tools and resources to deal with unfavorable situations.
Project Quality Management
Quality should never be an afterthought, it has to be built into the project from the start. But in the rush to meet deadlines or stay under budget, quality often takes a back seat. This results in rework, unhappy stakeholders, and missed opportunities. A good project manager makes sure there are clear quality standards in place, and tracks them throughout the project.
Lack of Communication
Good communication starts from the top down. When communication is strong, team members are clear on objectives and goals, and that clarity translates into productivity and innovation. But when there are communication mishaps, it can lead to serious problems in a project, including confusion, lack of accountability, and major setbacks. Improving communication within project teams requires honing not just your interpersonal skills, but your team’s as well.
Lack of Accountability
If everyone takes accountability for their decisions and actions, it leads to high performance. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes team members don’t take ownership of unproductive situations or their actions that led to mishaps. If left unaddressed, these unaccounted mishaps can start to feel like acceptable behavior. For example, if team members consistently fail to meet deadlines, it can become the norm.
That said, experts have found that a lack of accountability often stems from an organization’s inability to clearly communicate and reinforce its own value of accountability.
Lack of Strategic Alignment (Doing the Wrong Projects)
It’s possible to execute a project perfectly, and still fail. Why? Because the project itself wasn’t aligned with the organization’s bigger picture. When teams spend time and energy on projects that don’t support core business goals, it’s a waste of valuable resources. Strategic alignment means making sure every project you take on ties back to the company’s vision, priorities, and long-term goals.
Project Management Book Recommendations
How can project managers best overcome the 13 project management challenges above? Here are the 7 top project management books that are useful for both new and experienced project managers.
The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling
1-Sentence-summary
This book explains how to execute your work effectively and explores various ideas on increasing engagement and maintaining accountability.
What It Teaches You
The 4 Disciplines of Execution gives you practical advice on getting big goals done by focusing on what matters most, tracking the right actions, staying motivated, and regularly checking progress with your team.
Key Takeaways
There are 4 disciplines that we need to master to achieve perfect execution. That includes focusing on the most important goals that will make all the difference for the organization. Being able to leverage high-impact activities that will build on past performance. Keeping your team engaged and motivated. Finally, the fourth discipline is ensuring accountability.
Best For
From frontline workers to senior managers, this book is for anyone wanting to execute their goals and achieve outstanding results.
Favorite Quote
“If you ignore the urgent, it can kill you today…if you ignore the important, it can kill you tomorrow.”
Book Review
The 4 Disciplines of Execution takes a simple, easy-to-understand approach to explain what you need to focus on to get things done. Many readers say its ideas are easy to apply, whether in an organization or for personal goals. The book also includes case studies and additional resources for deeper insight.
Learn more with our free The 4 Disciplines of Execution summary here.
How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
1-Sentence summary
This book explains how you can improve your chances of success with personal or professional projects.
What It Teaches You
When we rush into execution without proper planning, this often results in delays, cost overruns, and unforeseen problems. Rushing is the reason why most big projects fail. Success lies in slowing down to think clearly before acting decisively.
Key Takeaways
Most larger projects take longer than expected to complete and underdeliver on what they promise. Some issues they encounter include commitment fallacy, cost fallacy, struggles with power dynamics, and overall inadequate planning. The authors of the book present 11 key ideas to help mitigate failed projects. These include starting with the end in mind, going for modularity, using frequent experimentation, building a cohesive team, and adapting and evolving to mention a few.
Best For
Project managers, policymakers, startup founders, or anyone responsible for turning ideas into reality.
Favorite Quote
“Think slow, act fast — that’s how big things get done.”
Book Review
How Big Things Get Done is a sharp, deeply researched, easy-to-digest book that challenges many of our assumptions about success. Bent Flyvbjerg brings decades of data and real-world project analysis, while Dan Gardner adds clarity and storytelling. The book cuts through project management jargon to show what actually works. It’s filled with vivid examples, from the Sydney Opera House to Pixar films, and leaves you with a clear sense of why so many big ideas fail and what you can do differently.
Learn more with our free How Big Things Get Done summary here.
The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis
1-Sentence Summary
This book shows how DevOps can transform your organization by improving collaboration, speed, quality, and reliability in software delivery.
What It Teaches You
The DevOps Handbook teaches you how to break down silos between IT, security, and operations teams by using DevOps principles to speed up delivery, reduce failures, and create more resilient systems.
Key Takeaways
Many organizations waste time and money because their IT teams work in silos, leading to delays, breakdowns, and burnout. DevOps changes this by encouraging a unified approach where development and operations teams work together. It focuses on three core principles: speeding up flow from development to operations, creating fast feedback loops, and creating a continual learning culture.
Best For
This book is for IT leaders, developers, and business managers who want to reduce deployment time, avoid outages, and create systems that evolve quickly and safely.
Favorite Quote
“Now more than ever, how technology work is managed and performed predicts whether our organizations will win in the marketplace, or even survive.”
Book Review
The DevOps Handbook is a practical guide that explains how to move from outdated, high-stress IT setups to fast, reliable, and high-performing systems. The book breaks down big concepts into simple, actionable steps, and shares examples from real companies to help you see how DevOps can work in your organization.
You can read our free The DevOps Handbook summary here.
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt
1-Sentence Summary
The Goal explores improving productivity and profitability by identifying and continuously resolving system constraints.
What It Teaches You
The main goal of any business is to make money, and to do that, you need to get a solid grip on how work flows in your system. This book kicks off with the Theory of Constraints (TOC), which is a great way to identify limiting factors and keep improving. Plus, it shows you how to think critically and question assumptions using the Socratic method.
Key Takeaways
The true goal of a business is to make money. Productivity means making progress toward that goal, not just staying busy. The book encourages us to focus on three key metrics; throughput, inventory, and operating expense.
Best For
Operations managers, business leaders, project managers, engineers, and anyone who wants to understand systems thinking, improve workflow, or solve complex business problems.
Favorite Quote
“We’re a team. And the team does not arrive in camp until all of us arrive in camp.”
Book Review
The Goal portrays business challenges through the relatable story of a struggling manager. As readers follow Alex Rogo’s journey to transform his failing plant, they gain an intuitive understanding of the Theory of Constraints and continuous improvement. The principles discussed are relevant across various contexts, whether you’re managing a factory, leading a tech project, or attempting to remove bottlenecks from your own life. The book is thought-provoking and provides actionable insights for anyone seeking to achieve real results in any major project.
You can read our free The Goal summary here.
The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
1-Sentence Summary
The Phoenix Project shows how companies can transform chaotic IT operations into a strategic advantage by applying DevOps principles, systems thinking, and process engineering.
What It Teaches You
This book reveals how most companies treat IT as a chaotic, reactive function, which traps them in a spiral of inefficiency and outages. Through the fictional story of Parts Unlimited, we see how applying lean principles, managing constraints, reducing unplanned work, and encouraging collaboration between IT and business units can turn IT into a powerful enabler of business success.
Key Takeaways
There are four types of IT work, but it’s the unplanned stuff, like firefighting, that causes the most chaos, so that’s where improvement has to start. DevOps steps in by looking at the big picture, building quick feedback loops, and fostering a culture of constant learning and growth. The book reminds us that IT’s goal is to help the business pick up speed, innovate, and stay ahead of the competition.
Best For
Project Managers, IT managers, DevOps professionals, CIOs, CTOs, Business leaders, and process engineers
Favorite Quote
“Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.”
Book Review
The Phoenix Project teaches deep operational lessons through an engaging fictional narrative. Instead of dry theory, you follow relatable characters as they deal with real-world chaos, cross-functional conflicts, and leadership challenges. The book makes complex concepts, like DevOps, Lean, and constraints, easy to understand and practical to apply. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to transform IT from a reactive cost center into a proactive engine of innovation and business growth.
You can read our free The Phoenix Project summary here.
Scrum by Jeff Sutherland
1-Sentence Summary
Scrum introduces a practical, flexible framework that helps teams reduce waste, improve collaboration, and deliver faster results.
What It Teaches You
This book explains how the Scrum framework changes traditional project management. It uses short, focused sprints and clearly defined team roles. The body of knowledge offered in this book helps teams cut out unnecessary steps, focus on customer needs, and use real-time feedback to create better products.
Key Takeaways
Traditional project management usually depends on long-term plans that can fall apart easily. Scrum takes a different route. It starts small, tests things quickly, and adjusts all the time. Here’s what sets it apart: The focus is on value rather than just process. It prioritizes small teams and empowers them to achieve significant results. Clear roles are emphasized for better collaboration. Speed is achieved through simplicity. Finally, it prioritizes happy teams, which are more likely to perform better.
Best For
Project managers, team leads, founders, or anyone managing work in fast-paced, unpredictable environments.
Favorite Quote
“Scrum accelerates human effort – it doesn’t matter what that effort is.”
Book Review
This book is a wake-up call for any project manager still relying on rigid plans and long meetings to move projects forward. Scrum challenges outdated practices with a faster, leaner way to get real work done. Jeff Sutherland provides valuable insights on how Scrum works by sharing stories from his military career, startup life, and government projects. If you’ve ever felt like your team is busy but not effective, this book offers a way forward.
Learn more with our free Scrum summary here.
The New One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard & Spencer Johnson
1-Sentence Summary
This book explains how to get better results, save time, and develop fulfilled, self-managing employees.
What It Teaches You
The authors demonstrate how small but intentional actions from a manager can create clarity, improve performance, and build a more empowered team. The three secrets to getting a motivated team include concise goal-setting, immediate positive feedback, and quick course correction. The book emphasizes developing people while delivering results.
Key Takeaways
People are more likely to succeed when they know exactly what is expected of them. By taking a minute to set clear goals, managers eliminate confusion and align everyone’s efforts. Recognition fuels motivation, and praising someone in the moment when they do something right builds confidence and reinforces good behavior. Mistakes should be addressed as soon as possible with compassion and clarity, not to punish, but to guide and refocus. Over time, these practices help people become self-managing, reducing the need for constant oversight.
Best For
This book is especially valuable for new managers, team leaders, business owners, and anyone who wants a straightforward, human-centered approach to leadership. Its principles are applicable not only in the workplace but in any setting where people work together — schools, families, volunteer teams, and more.
Favorite Quote
“The best minute I spend is the one I invest in people.”
Book Review
The New One Minute Manager is a quick read, but its wisdom stays with you. Blanchard and Johnson deliver timeless insights through a simple story that anyone can relate to. The techniques are easy to apply yet powerful enough to transform how you manage and lead. The ideas are also quite applicable in today’s fast-paced, feedback-hungry world.
You can read our free The New One Minute Manager summary here.
Bonus Project Management Books
Here is 3 additional books on project management to help you with planning, organizing, an executing successful projects.
Project Management Absolute Beginner’s Guide by Greg Horine
This introductory book is created for people with no experience in project management or who have not taken any courses in project management. It does a good job of walking through the basics of project management, from concepts of project management to planning, scheduling, risk analysis, and communication. What makes it stand out is how it speaks to the real-life experience of first-time project leads. It helps you get your bearings, avoid early mistakes, and understand what actually matters in the field of project management.
Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager by Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore, and James Wood
This comprehensive guide is written for the many people who end up managing projects without the official title or authority. The book focuses less on tools and templates, and more on practical leadership, how to gain buy-in, clarify goals, and keep a team moving when no one reports to you. It’s especially helpful for cross-functional work, where your influence matters more than your title. If you’ve ever found yourself in the middle of a project, this book helps you manage project management processes without burning out or chasing perfection.
Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
Agile Project Management takes a closer look at Scrum, which is a popular Agile management method. The authors teach you how to use it when your project keeps changing. Since it’s written by a co-creator of this agile approach, it doesn’t hold back on the difficult parts of working in fast-paced settings, and using Scrum to navigate them.
This guide for project management does a great job of showing how you can mix structure with flexibility, instead of getting stuck in lengthy, strict plans.
Finally, for project managers facing unclear requirements or constant project scope shifts, this comprehensive guide gives you a straightforward, disciplined system that’s all about equipping you with practical tools rather than just theory.
Master Project Management Fundamentals for Career Growth
Projects are an inevitable part of any workplace. Whether you’re managing a digital project or a complex project (like infrastructural development), the core concepts and skills from the list of project management books above will help you to advance as a more effective project manager and a team leader.
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