Monthly Archives: March 2003

Dealing with Multi-tasking

Posted on March 27, 2003 by Johanna

I’m at the Software Development conference this week. One of the hot topics I discussed in my presentations and with attendees during and after the talks were about context switching and multitasking, Focused Performance and Breakthrough Thinking on Worker Productivity … Continue reading →

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Choose When to Separate People Management From Project Management

Posted on March 21, 2003 by Johanna

  I was on the phone this morning with a senior manager. He was describing their current project: “Well, we’ve got 25 people: 12 developers, 6 testers, 2 writers, 4 support people, and 1 project manager.” I asked about the … Continue reading →

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More Eyes are Better Than Two

Posted on March 19, 2003 by Johanna

  I seem to have a vision theme happening this week :-) How many kinds of review do you perform on your project’s work products? Especially with software projects, it makes sense to review interim work products, so you have … Continue reading →

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Seeing Your Project’s State

Posted on March 15, 2003 by Johanna

  I was working on a newsletter article about how to see your project’s progress, and got stuck. It’s easier to see project progress on a project with a tangible deliverable; it’s much harder for software or a service project. … Continue reading →

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Four questions to ask of every project

Posted on March 12, 2003 by Johanna

  Sometimes, it’s not clear that you should fund or staff a project. If you’re not sure how to discriminate between alternative projects, here are four questions to ask: What’s the strategic reason behind this project? (Does the strategic reason … Continue reading →

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Single-Dimension Measurements: How NOT to measure technical staff

Posted on March 10, 2003 by Johanna

  I’m facilitating a roundtable, Test Management 101, on Stickyminds, and someone just posted a question about how to measure testers to show return on investment: measuring the number of defects they find. Ouch. When you measure developers on the … Continue reading →

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Agile Practices Create Non-Hierarchical Teams

Posted on March 6, 2003 by Johanna

  Fred Brooks, in his classic, “The Mythical Man-Month,” talks about a chief programmer team (chief programmer, and programmers of lesser hierarchy until you get to the peon). The chief programmer team works when one person can keep all the … Continue reading →

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Manage to the End of the Project – Avoid Crossing the Desert

Posted on March 5, 2003 by Johanna

  Sometimes on a project, we focus on an intermediate milestone in the project, such as Beta, or first performance test, or early ship. The project team works like dogs to make that intermediate milestone. Then, there’s still the rest … Continue reading →

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Start a Journal

Posted on March 3, 2003 by Johanna

  If you’re a project manager, a functional manager, a technical lead, or someone who wants to improve their work, start a journal or a log. When I was an engineer, I kept an engineering notebook. I discovered a bunch … Continue reading →

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