Today’s guest post is courtesy of William Reynolds. You’ve worked hard for years earning your college degree. You’ve slaved away at your own projects and developed your technical knowledge base. Now you feel ready to play a vital role programming, troubleshooting or engineering for a high-profile company or organization — but have you prepared for […]
In Part 1, we discussed the cost of delay of not shipping on time. In Part 2, we discussed the cost of delay of multitasking. In this part, we’ll discuss a cost of delay due to management indecision. Here’s a problem I encounter often. A middle manager calls me, and asks for an estimation workshop.
In Cost of Delay: Not Shipping on Time, Part 1, I introduced you to the notion of cost of delay. I said you could reduce the cost of delay by managing your projects: have shorter projects, using release criteria, or selecting a lifecycle that manages the risk. Sometimes, you don’t have short projects, so projects
Do you know about the Cost of Delay? It’s the way to think about the revenue you can lose plus the cost of continued development. One of my managers many years ago had a back of the napkin approach to cost of delay. “Johanna, we want to ship this product in the second quarter this
Back in More Interview Questions Not to Ask, Part 1, I said that hiring managers and teams should not ask irrelevant questions. Some of you here, and on LinkedIn and Facebook asked, “How do we answer these questions?” Here’s how you do it. If someone asks you “Who do you most admire and why?” use
There’s a great comment to my recent Management Myth: Performance Reviews Are Useful. The writer has these questions, which I have paraphrased: 1. How do bonuses work? Here’s the problem with bonuses in a team-based organization (agile or not). How can you tell who has done which work? Who actually knows who has contributed what?
Part 1 of this is More Interview Questions Not to Ask, Part 1. There are more questions from Interview Questions: Hiring Experts Reveal Their Favorites. I had mixed feelings about these questions. You need to be a savvy interviewer to pull these off: • Describe an environment in which you would not thrive. • So
Three Tips for Becoming a Servant Leader You and I both know that we’re not supposed to boss people around anymore, that we’re supposed to be servant leaders. Well, a client asked me, “What the heck is servant leadership?” When you’re a traditional manager, you might have thought of accumulating people and power. If you
I was reading Interview Questions: Hiring Experts Reveal Their Favorites. Some of them are quite good. But some of them? Not so much. Here are the ones you should avoid, and why: Who do you most admire and why? What is your passion? If you could do anything, what would be your ideal job? Why
I have received some wonderful feedback from some of my managers. Back when I was a young engineer, one of my managers gave me the feedback at an annual review that I didn’t quite finish my projects. “Oh, you mean on the project I just finished last week?” I wanted to know if it was