Monthly Archives: January 2004

Teaching Scheduling to New Project Managers

Posted on January 28, 2004 by Johanna

  I’m developing a syllabus at the graduate level to teach high tech (if that matters) project management to people without a lot of PM experience. I’m supposed to teach MS Project as the tool project managers schedule the work. … Continue reading →

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Lunch with Colleagues

Posted on January 27, 2004 by Johanna

  Laurent’s post, The team building lunch prompted a bunch of (hopefully now organized) thoughts about the role of food in high tech projects. One of the things I notice when I perform assessments is whether there is some sort … Continue reading →

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Visible Progress

Posted on January 23, 2004 by Johanna

  Rick commented on my last post that some engineers think that status checking slows them down. Mark said that engineers push back on demos and pointless measurements and then said in another comment, “progress metrics can always be free.” … Continue reading →

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What’s the Worst Thing that Could Happen?

Posted on January 21, 2004 by Johanna

  At Boston SPIN last night, Tim Lister of “Waltzing with Bears” fame gave a talk about recognizing and managing risk. It was great. If you ever have a chance to see Tim speak in person, do so (Yes, Tom … Continue reading →

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Describing Requirements

Posted on January 16, 2004 by Johanna

  In my last post, I argued that functional and non-functional requirements are unsuitable for the art of describing requirements. I prefer to discuss attributes of the system instead, and then talk about functionality. (Gause and Weinberg wrote Exploring Requirements, … Continue reading →

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Users Can’t Know Their Requirements Early

Posted on January 13, 2004 by Johanna

  I’ve been thinking more about requirements. In the most recent two assessments I’ve done, both organizations have been stuck on thinking they could define their requirements before design and implementation. IWBNI (It Would Be Nice If) users could know … Continue reading →

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Publication Alert

Posted on January 8, 2004 by Johanna

  In this issue of Better Software, I have the featured article, No More Second Class Testers! and Frank Patrick has a great article, “Promises and Prescriptions, How the Theory of Constraints can help cure common project ailments.” I can’t … Continue reading →

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People, Process, and Predicting Project Success

Posted on January 6, 2004 by Johanna

  I’ve been thinking a lot about the comments people made on the Best Practices… post. (Thank you for your comments.) Here’s my experience. Great people, people with sufficient functional skills and domain expertise can trump process, good or bad. … Continue reading →

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