I’ve discussed this situation with several managers recently. The manager says, “I have a wonderful developer, who can code circles around everyone else. If he doesn’t like someone else’s code, he rewrites it over the weekend. If he sees a hole, he writes a ton of code over the weekend He starts work early and
Remember Why Projects Don’t Need Specialists? Well, I decided I had a little more to say. I decided to write an article, What’s So Special About Specialists? Please do comment there or here.
For years, many project and functional managers have believed they need the “exact right person” in each role on a project. Those exact right people are specialists, and some of them have quite narrow specialties. Here’s the story of one specialist and her impact on several projects. Two project managers needed the same person, a
Last Tuesday, I had a blast at Boston SPIN. I led a roundtable about transitioning to agile, and discovered that not everyone takes the feedback the timebox gives them. In this case, people weren’t finishing what they “attempted to commit to” in the timebox, but they extended the timebox. I suggested that was not such
Jurgen asked me to help publicize his survey. Ok, I’ve done it. Now, let me rant about explain why I think surveys like this are not useful, and may be harmful. A survey does not take your context into account. Surveys about any practices without considering the industry, the products, and the management don’t tell
I’ve been writing this post forever (for a month), and finally deleted that one and have started over again. We had over 1500 submissions, so the stage producers and review teams made the difficult decisions when they accepted about 20% for the program. (Difficult is not nearly descriptive enough. Complex, merciless, intricate, knotty are helpful
It’s now a hiring manager’s market. That means hiring managers can be picky and try to find just the right person for the open req. But, it also means that many applicants exist for each open req, and all of those people are applying for your job. How does a hiring manager find the right
There’s a discussion on a mailing list about a partially committed-to project: there aren’t enough people on the project, the people don’t have the time to do the work because they are interrupted all the time by support of previously released applications. The only people available are part-time people who are not available when the
I’m trying to clean up the project portfolio management book for technical review, and I realized the other night (well, morning, when I woke up), that I’d missed explaining a key idea. We all work on several kinds of projects: Projects that maintain the organization, the kind we need to run. These projects “keep the
A number of my friends of long standing and colleagues are looking for jobs. (Friends of long standing is another way to say old friends without calling them old 🙂 They all have over 20 years of experience. The way they used to find jobs–through recruiters–is not working. Sure, recruiters have some openings, but most