I had lunch a few weeks ago with a very savvy senior manager. She gave me a great sourcing tip. She said, “I look for candidates where other people seem to find candidates like the ones I’m looking for.” This is the same idea as loose networking. As you wander through LinkedIn, looking for candidates,
When I was in Brazil teaching the project portfolio workshop, one of the participants explained that his organization sometimes did a form of gold/silver/bronze comparison among the projects. Here’s how it works. Everyone wrote their project names on stickies. The first cut is everyone self-assigns their projects to Gold, Silver, Bronze categories. That’s right, everyone
Now, say you are looking for a job as an agile project manager. Some people might say that’s a crazy job. But hang in there with me for a minute. Imagine you have two or three teams, larger than two pizzas might feed. So, you might well need an agile project manager to coordinate the
If you are looking for a project manager, what questions might you ask? Well, it might depend if you are agile, or geographically distributed, or how large a project or program you have. All of those pieces of your context are going to feed into your question development. I hope you ask behavior-description questions. That
My most recent management myth is up on Techwell, Management Myth #8: I Can Still Do Significant Technical Work. I see managers catch themselves in this one all the time. Maybe you do too. Maybe you disagree with me. Comment over there, please. BTW, This article is a partial attempt to answer the question, “How
I facilitated a project management clinic last week at PSL. One of the questions was this: We have a product owner who persists in changing the contents of the sprint during the sprint. This is difficult for us. It costs us to change the content. Okay, this is a huge pain in the tush. It’s
In my talk, How Much Will this Project Cost? at Agile 2012 last week, I got to say, “Short is beautiful.” For those of you who have never seen me, I’m five feet tall. The question was something like this: For programs, don’t you want longer iterations, so people don’t have the overhead of planning,
I caught up with Fred, a friend of longstanding, just before what I thought would be his normal two- to three-week vacation in August. “Where are you going this year, Fred? Are you bicycling or white water rafting? Or something else exciting? I can’t wait to live vicariously through you again!” “I’m not going anywhere
If you are planning a vacation, read my next management myth, Management Myth #7: I Am too Valuable to Take a Vacation. It doesn’t matter where you are in the organization, you need to take a vacation. And, you need to totally remove yourself from the day-to-day grind when you do. Read it.
I’ve been talking to a variety of potential clients about their project portfolios. One of the big problems is how to see all the work. Some of these folks have multiple kinds of projects, so they want to show their work in a variety of ways. What do you do when you have a few