Is the Urgent Consuming You? When you start work in the morning, what do you do? Do you check email, listen to your voicemail? Let the urgent take over your day? Do your meetings drive your day? If you do, you are not alone. Is there a better way? There can be. You can take
Many years ago, I was part of a task force to “standardize” project management at an organization. I suggested we gather some data to see what kinds of projects the client had. They had short projects, where it was clear what they had to do: 1-3 week projects where 2-4 people could run with the
In Manage Your Job Search, I discuss a number of traps. A common one is “spray and pray” for your resume. Spray-and-pray is when you send your resume everywhere, without thinking of your target market. You are not perfect for every job. Every company is not perfect for you. Do not apply everywhere. Instead of
Emergent Projects: Managing the Unpredictable Are you planning a change project, managing your way through a job search, or some other not-totally-deterministic project? Wouldn’t it be nice if life went according to plan? You could create a roadmap first, estimate how long things would take to get done, create a project plan, and do them.
When you’re a project manager for a traditional project, it’s easy to write a project charter. You can sit in your office and write it alone, if necessary. You don’t have to involve the team. On an agile project, is that the right thing to do? Should you even use the same template? Agile projects
Bill popped his head into Jan’s office as he was leaving for the evening. “Jan, do you have a minute? I have to do performance reviews tonight. I was going to drink Scotch and work my way through all of them.” Jan laughed and said, “Sure. Scotch might make you feel good, but it will
I’ve just been named to one of the 100 top management experts on Twitter. See Keeping Up with #Management:100 Experts on Twitter. You have to page down under “Executive Coaching” to see me. I’ll return to editing my “Design Your Agile Project” series now. It needs serious editing. That’s why you haven’t seen the next
When I was a young developer, my employers were hungry for talent. They hired women, as well as men. Of course, my first employer wanted to know what birth control I used, which was an illegal question at the time. I told them so. Fast forward to the 80’s, when I became a hiring manager.
What do you do for geographically distributed teams, if you want to move to agile? First question: does the team want to move to agile? Or, does the management want to move to agile? I am serious. I might take the same actions, but for different different reasons. In either case, the team needs to
There’s a comment in Interview Questions for Program Managers. What should I do if I have experience relevant to being a program manager, but I haven’t been a program manager? How do I answer these questions? (I had posted a number of potential questions a hiring manager could ask a program manager in that post.)