What is the mythical man-month? If you're familiar with the analogy that you can't add more people to a pregnancy to make it go faster (I think that's how it goes), then you're already familiar with the mythical man-month. It's a book about software development and project management written by Frederick Brooks, Jr. during his time at IBM. I know this gets quoted all of the time, but just bear with me.

While the book is a little old, I think every project manager, developer, or individual associated with software development should read. While some of the non-tech people may get lost in the acronyms, just encourage them to keep reading past it to get a gist of the processes. You can even tell them to skip to the back of the book with the outline. With many of the buzz words being thrown around today like Agile, eXtreme Programming, etc., I think this book provides a solid base for anyone to understand the onus behind the other management frameworks.

My takeaways from the book:

• People and months are not interchangeable.
• Communicate early and often.
• Scope, time, and budget. Pick two. (Ok this one was more of my own, but it's well represented in the book.)

Wikipedia has much more on this book than I wanted to cover here. Don't let that summary fool you into thinking that you know everything the book has to offer. The real value is in the stories and knowledge of Brooks as he has learned them over the course of his career. But if you're that impatient, as I've mentioned before, then you can skip to the back of the book and everything is summarized in an outline format.

I've encouraged all of the non-tech people in my startup, Be The Builders, to read this. So go pick up a copy of The Mythical Man-Month. You and your team won't be disappointed.