Have you read The STEM Crisis Is a Myth? It’s a fascinating article. Bob actually has data, as opposed to my anecdotal evidence, now and dating back to my article from 2001, Crisis? What Crisis? A Contrarian Perspective. (For those of you who don’t know the four letter acronym, STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and
“George is on his offshoring rampage again,” Cindy said as she slumped down in Ted’s visitor chair. Ted saved his document and turned around. “Oh? Want to tell me about it?” “I need more testers for the feature teams we’re starting, right? I told him. I showed him the project portfolio and the projects we
I just read Social Media is Paralyzing HR. (Hat tip to John Sumser, @JohnSumser who tweeted it.) I sympathize with Paul, who is sympathizing with HR. Let me tell you what I see in too many small to medium size companies: One lonely HR person who is trying to do: All the recruiting for all
If you read my most recent post, Comparing Teams Is Not Useful: Exposing Another Management Myth and the comments, you will see that I rant about the business of normalizing story points for predicting cost or schedule for a program. That led to several comments re SAFe for programs or other frameworks or lifecycles for
One of the top posts on this site is Interview Questions for Project Managers. I bet some of you are interviewing for program managers, too. Here’s a little guidance for how to interview for those jobs. A program manager is a strategic job. Remember, a program is a collection of projects where the business value
Barry bustled into Sam’s office. “Hey Sam, I need to see how these teams are doing— compared to each other. How do you compare teams?” “I don’t compare teams,” said Sam. “Why are you trying to compare teams?” “So I can tell who’s being more productive and who’s slacking off,” Barry replied. “But I thought
Every so often, managers want to compare teams. You’ve heard this in several ways: Managers want teams to “normalize” their story points, so they can better predict the cost or schedule for the rest of the backlog in large programs. This doesn’t work, but managers want to do it anyway. Managers want to compare teams
I just completed writing a series on agile recruiting for Dice.com. Here are all the posts: What is Agile Anyway? How Tech Teams Manage Workload in Agile What the Heck is Kanban? Agile Culture and Recruiting–Hiring Geeks That Fit Five W’s of Agile Recruiting I hope you enjoy these posts. Tell all your recruiter friends!
Are you going to Agile 2013? If you are, maybe these tips will help you. Consider using the schedule planner app to remind you of the sessions you thought you wanted to attend. However, don’t be bound to those sessions. You might meet someone in the hall, or at a meal, have a conversation, and
Are too many job descriptions over-specifying what they need? I read these two posts: Shooting Ourselves in the Foot Isn’t an Effective Engagement Strategy and Top 3 Hiring Mistakes to Avoid. Both posts discuss poor job analysis. This is the issue of How Many Essential Skills Do You Require? Over-specifying a job is bad management and