A Small New Year’s Tip: Timebox, Not Scopebox I hope you are all enjoying your holidays. Many people use this time of year to reflect and then make New Year’s resolutions. I’m not one of them. Sure, I reflect, but I rarely make any New Year’s resolutions. I’ve never kept a resolution for more than […]
I just posted the October Pragmatic Email newsletter, You Can’t Do All the Work. Now What? If you subscribed, you’d have already received today’s…. Have a great New Year’s everyone.
Rant on. There’s a flame-fest on the scrumdevelopment list about the use of “resources” or “people” to describe the human beings on projects. I like “humans” or “human beings” or “people.” And, I actually prefer “resources” to “man-hours.” I can live with “people-hours,” and prefer that to “resource.” I bet you’re a little surprised. I’ve
If you have to make yourself a New Year’s resolution, resolve to be a Passionate Programmer (or a passionate whatever-you-are). Chad Fowler wrote a delightful book, The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development. What Chad doesn’t realize is that you don’t have to be a programmer to read this book. You can
Andy Lester has written a great book about finding a job you love in any market. He thinks it’s just for technical people, but he’s wrong. It’s for anyone who wants to find a job that he or she can love. The first section is all about preparing to interview: knowing what you want in
A bunch of my not-happily-employed colleagues (some are unhappy, some are unemployed) are in the enjoyable place of considering job offers. One of them asked, “How do I know it’s a good offer?” You have at least two options I know of, to evaluate salary options: Payscale.com and Salary.com. (If you know of other free
A colleague is putting his resume together for the first time in several years. “I’ve been at the same desk, working for the same boss, on the same projects for the last three years. But my company has changed names at least four times in that time. What do I say?” Here’s the way I
A new article is up, Using the Project Portfolio to Move to Incremental Project Funding. It’s up on PMBoulevard.com. (Free registration required). Enjoy!
If you’ve started to use agile approaches to your projects, you’ve reaped the benefits of seeing completed work, reduced work in progress, and making project risks more transparent earlier. But there’s another benefit of moving to delivering work in smaller chunks: incremental funding for projects. Few organizations have embraced the idea of incremental funding. It’s
On mailing lists, when I speak, in email, people ask, “When did ‘some principle, approach, or whatever’ start?” A long time ago. Timeboxes have been around forever. I’m pretty sure that when the Pharoahs told their architects to build a pyramid, they said, “And do it by this-date! Or else!” I know that military projects