AntiPatterns in Project Management Review

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(More customer reviews)The basic idea of the book is good: Identify and classify commonly occuring project management problems (AntiPatterns), discuss them a bit, and present a solution.
However, the book mostly fails to deliver.
For one, the book has imposed a superficial and poorly fit structure to the description of every AntiPattern. The result is that lots of information, like the causes and results of the AntiPattern, will be described two or three times in slightly different forms. This bloats the book needlessly. If a different form had been selected - say, a collection of essays - the book could have been 150 pages instead of the massive ~450 pages it is now.
Another reason the book fails, is that many of the solutions seem firmly planted in old thinking about project management as advocated by SEI, NASA/SEL, and others. Significantly, change is mostly regarded as evil. One of the recommended solutions to change in the Chaos AntiPattern is "Develop a software development plan and stick to it". In the Gilding the Lily AntiPattern (a.k.a. "Gold Plating"), it states that "Often the architects and developers must be physically prevented from making changes." Also, while incremental or iterative development is carefully mentioned in places, most of the solutions fit best with linear, phased, and pretty inflexible development paradigms. The book would have benefited from using solutions from more agile methodology thinking.
A third reason is that some of the solutions don't attack the root causes at all. The one and only solution to the Process Disintegration AntiPattern (where people don't follow the process because it is too heavy) is to institute an internal, no-process-at-all, developer-driven project. But how does this solve the problem for all of the company's normal projects that, presumably, are still expected to follow some normal process? The book doesn't say.
The book is not totally hopeless, though. It can be useful to be aware of most of the AntiPatterns and their causes, as well as some of the solutions.
But in the end I wouldn't recommend this book neither to inexperienced project managers - who wouldn't be able to recognize what solutions are good and what are bad - or experienced project managers, who would be enlightened enough to already know what they can do, or if not, would benefit much more from reading other books.

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