I’m happy to announce that Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Cost or Schedule is done and available. It’s available in electronic and print formats. If you need a little help explaining your estimates or how to use estimation (even #noestimate), read this book.
Several years ago, I had a senior VP as a client. He wanted his managers to work as more of a team. He thought they were not working together for the good of the company. I asked him why he thought that. “When they estimate, they don’t work together on an estimate. They each estimate
There’s a twitter discussion of what people “should” do in certain situations. One of the participants believes that people “should” want to learn on their own time and work more than 40 hours per week. I believe in learning. I don’t believe in expecting people to work more than 40 hours/week. My experience is that
As more of my clients transition to agile, many of them have a fascinating question: How do I assess who is doing what on my team? When I ask why they want to know, they say it’s all related to reviews, rewards, and general compensation. They are still discussing individual compensation, not team compensation. When
I’m a big fan of auditions in an interview. (I have many posts about auditions in this blog.) However, some hiring managers and teams push interviewing and auditions too far. When you’ve had three interviews, and your interviewer asks you to solve a problem for them—again—is it a hiring issue, or are they asking you
Some of you would like to know how to answer questions about the metrics you can gather and discuss when you look for a job as a project or program manager. Here are some tips: Tip 1: Separate the quantitative questions from the qualitative questions. I bet you have qualitative “measures” that you use either
I spoke with a new manager, Drew, the other day. His days are full. He’s got tons of meetings. He tries to provide feedback and coaching to his team members, but he has crises up the wazoo. Drew asked for coaching: “I have way too much to do. I need to learn how to manage
I have a post on this site, Interview Questions for Program Managers. There are a number of comments. Some ask how to answer the questions. Some want more information. Maybe you also read Six Tips for Answering Project and Program Manager Interview Questions or Interview Questions for Project Managers and want more detail. This is the detail. If
I have finished integrating comments from the early review of Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization. I decided that the book was good enough to release to the general public. I find it difficult to release books in progress. The in-progress part challenges my perfection rules. However, since this is an
I gave a webinar this past week to the BU Career Connection. We had a great turnout. I have posted my slides: Eight Traps (and Tips) of Networking When Job Searching. The slides are based on Manage Your Job Search. Since I published the book and have given talks about it, I have discovered more