I just read Penelope Trunk’s Quit work for a while to have kids. Your career will be just fine. I hope it’s true. I don’t understand how it can be true for highly technical people. I hope I’m wrong. I took off 3 months when each of my children was born. I didn’t want more […]
Bob Sutton has an intriguing post, A Surprising Study of Infant Mortality Rates: Evidence-Based Management Meets Evidence Medicine. One of the surprising conclusions: One kind of collaboration was linked to higher mortality rates. When front-line employees became more involved in unit governance — doing things like being involved in decisions about who was hired and
I was supposed to be doing an informational interview with an upcoming college grad now. She cancelled because she felt terrible. She said, “I’ve been feeling nauseous all day. I really wanted to talk to you when I’m at my best. Can we reschedule?” You betcha we can. If I’m going to give my time
Dave Liebreich sent me this email: I’m working with the new hire in our group, bringing him up to speed on our stuff. He noticed that I brought in my copy of “Manage It!”, and asked if it was to help me manage him. [pause for laughter] Never work for someone who refers to you
I have a new column up at Recruiting Trends. See Using Writing and Speaking to Recruit Candidates, Part 1. You can’t leave comments there, so please do so here.
I’ve been busy the last few weeks (as you can tell by the paucity of posts :-). I’ve been working with project managers, Scrum Masters, and technical leads who have been thrust into the role of Scrum Master. Here are some examples of the problems these nice folks have had: “When I want to use
Adam, from Write That Down, likes Manage it!. Here’s what he has to say: There is a great book called Manage It!, by Johanna Rothman. She does not disappoint, and really gets into the nitty gritty details about managing projects. While this is billed as a “project management” effort, it really does apply to product
I’ve been talking with a few hiring managers and a few senior candidates. The hiring managers are afraid to look at some senior people because they’re concerned the senior people will want salaries that are higher than the companies want to pay. The senior people are concerned that they can’t get interviews because the hiring
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Discovering and Maintaining Your Project’s Heartbeat, Part 2 Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Discovering and Maintaining Your Project’s Heartbeat, Part 2 Last month, I discussed how you to generate and maintain a project’s heartbeat–a project’s rhythm. If you missed that issue, see https://www.jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager/heartbeatpart1.html. This month, you might want to consider some
A cynical senior manager said, “It feels as if I’m stuck between the traditionalists and the agilistas. We can’t use phase-gate anymore, because it’s not ‘agile’ enough. And the last time, when that multisite project tried Scrum, they failed miserably. Isn’t there a right approach to our projects?” A project doesn’t have to use just