Summary: Hiring is difficult to do well, Johanna Rothman writes in her latest management myth piece. Because everyone who is looking to hire has a job, they think they know how to hire. But it’s not easy. You want to hire the best people you can who fit the team and the organization. “Hi, Tricia, […]
There are many hiring traps and shortcuts, especially for technical people. Partially that’s because too few HR people know about technical people. But, partially that’s because too many technical people think, “I have a job, I must know what it takes to hire well.” In my most recent management myth, Management Myth 27: We Can
I have a new column up on project management.com. It’s called Debugging Your Geographically Distributed Agile Team. (You have to register to read it. Registration is free.) You can do agile with geographically distributed teams. You might not be able to do Scrum. You have other choices of approaches. Helping a team form is tough.
Back when I was a Director of many things at one company, we had an urgent patch to go to a customer. My VP wanted it “yesterday.” Well, time only goes in one direction. I gathered my continuing engineering team, explained the pickle we were in. “Everyone wants this patch right away. However the customer
I saw this post on Twitter, The 3 Interview Questions You Should Ask to Instantly Gauge Fit. I got excited. Oh, maybe we do have questions that address cultural fit. No such luck. More stupid irrelevant and hypothetical questions. I am so disappointed. If you are a candidate and an interviewer asks you these questions
I’ve outlined five potential costs of delay in the previous five posts: The delay from not releasing on time, part 1 The delay from multitasking,part 2 The delay from indecision, part 3 The delay from technical debt, part 4 The delay from other teams as part of a program, part 5 The real problem is
Along with my series about interviewing tips, I thought you might need a few tips for editing your resume. Here they are: Write a first draft of your resume. Write it in reverse chronological order, with your most recent job first. Now, put it away for a few days, while you do other things. Your
Imagine you have a large program, where you have several teams contributing to the success of one business deliverable. You are all trying to achieve a specific date for release. One team is having trouble. Maybe this is their first missed deliverable. Maybe it’s their second. Maybe they have had trouble meeting their deliverables all
Cost of delay part 1 was about not shipping on time. Cost of delay part 2 was due to multitasking. Cost of delay part 3 was due to indecision. This part is the cost of delay due to technical debt. One of the big problems in backlog management is ranking technical debt stories. It’s even
Sharon poked her head into Heath’s cubicle. “Hey, Heath, are you done yet with that fix?” Heath turned around. “Sharon, you asked me that less than an hour ago. I’m not done yet.” “Well, I need to know when you will be done. Oh, and I need to know if you’re using the design we