I’ve said before that you cannot use capacity planning for the project portfolio. I also said that managers often want to know how much the project will cost. Why? Because businesses have to manage costs. No one can have runaway projects. That is fair. If you use an agile or incremental approach to your projects,
I was thinking about the Glen Alleman’s post, All Things Project Are Probabilistic. In it, he says, Management is Prediction as a inference from Deming. When I read this quote, If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. –Deming I infer from Deming that managers must
Is Your Agile Journey Based on Problems or Process? You can start your agile journey in any number of ways. Some people like to start with Scrum, because it’s a project management framework. Some people like to start with Kanban, because it reflects your current project approach and allows you to visualize your workflow. You
I was reading IDEO’s Culture of Helping. Especially if you are hiring for an agile team, you want to hire for helpfulness. Do You Have a Helpful Culture? Notice, that it’s not about expertise or competence. The most helpful people are people who were trustworthy and accessible. When you hire for the cultural fit of
I was problem-solving with a potential client the other day. They want to manage their project portfolio. They use Jira, so they think they can see everything everyone is doing. (I’m a little skeptical, but, okay.) They want to know how much the teams can do, so they can do capacity planning based on what
A senior product manager had a great interview the other day. “I know the industry. I worked on the first generation of their product. I know their customers. I could do this job. I understand their problems. I showed them how I’d solved their problems in the past. I can do this again. “It’s a
My manager reviewed the org chart along with the budget. “I need to cut the budget. Which resources can we cut?” “Well, I don’t think we can cut software licenses,” I was reviewing my copy of the budget. “I don’t understand this overhead item here,” I pointed to a particular line item. “No,” he said.
Summary: It is unfortunate that the department attending to employees is called “Human Resources.” That language colors what managers call people in the organization. But the more you call people “resources,” the more they become interchangeable—and more like desks, or infrastructure, or something that is easily negotiable. Resources are not people. People are not resources.
When I speak to job hunters, they often think they can get a job doing what they studied, or what they have done, or they way they have always searched. “But the last three times I looked, I looked exactly this way.” “This is what I studied in school. I should be able to find
I posted my slides for my Agile 2014 talk, Agile Projects, Program & Portfolio Management: No Air Quotes Required on Slideshare. It’s a bootcamp talk, so the majority of the talk is making sure that people understand the basics about projects. Walk before you run. That part. However, you can take projects and “scale” them