I’m reviewing an article from a long-time colleague who’s just started to write. He has great ideas. And the way he’s packaged his ideas (the writing part) doesn’t do justice to them. There’s a mnemonic* I use (when I remember 🙂 to help me package my ideas better. It’s Hey! You! See? So… Hey! grabs […]
Don has a great post on Single Point Requirements. You get one example of the requirements: “This product needs to do this. Just this.” Sure enough some months (or years) later, that single example is not sufficiently general to do everything you want the product to do. That’s ok, as long as you plan to
I’m guest blogging this week on computerworld.com. It’s different from what I normally post here.
My quarterly Stickyminds column, How Much Work Can You Do? is up. Hope you read and comment.
Experience and Education makes the point We hire people to complete tasks and run functions (not really–we employ talent to create value, but I?ll try to stick to the point). He goes on to say The problem is, both of these (years of experience and education) are unreliable measures of whether someone can do a
A couple of weeks ago (yes, I know I’m behind :-), Scott Berkun asked in Teaching programming / management the Harvard way“Anyone have examples of CASE or situation based courses for managers, designers and programmers? Undergraduate or graduate?” Yes, Scott, I do. When I teach program management and software methodology (at the graduate level
Mike Kelly posted some reflections on Behind Closed Doors: Making Progress Visible. I love it when people understand why their managers are asking questions.
Amit Rathmore has a thought-provoking essay, Recruiting and the Butterfly Effect. His conclusion is that the people closest to the founding team need to be the ones interviewing candidates, so that the newest hires are as close the ideals and capabilities as the original hires. My only quibble with Amit is that this technique does
Recently, a manager asked how he could detect critical thinking skills in candidates. I had to ask him more questions, so I could answer. Here’s what he meant by critical thinking skills: The ability to think through a problem in a certain architectural domain The ability to deal with people across the organization in planning
I had a discussion recently with a manager who was concerned about his developers meeting their milestones. “We have “Code Complete” as a milestone. The developers say they meet it, but that just means they wrote code until the milestone date. The code isn’t complete. I can’t even tell how complete it is.” Ah,