One of the big problems in organizations is how to fund projects. ROI does not work. I learned how to lie with ROI back in 1988—I can make the numbers be anything you want. But if you don’t have ROI, how do you know what projects to fund? One set of projects is the set […]
George Dinwiddie asked me a question in email, “Why do companies hire junior-level contractors? I feel bad about spending the company’s money trying to teach these junior contractors to be better software developers. A junior-level direct hire makes sense, as you expect them to be around long enough that the education pays off. But a
A reminder: I’m teaching a public project management workshop in Waltham, MA, Sept 22-24, 2008. If you would like to: Understand different lifecycles and when (and how) to use them Practice pragmatic approaches to organizing and estimating a project Learn a variety of ways to steer a project to success Learn how to develop and
I was shopping today, taking advantage of the summer sales. One of my favorite retailers offers petite sizes online, but almost nothing in the store. I go to the store to try the clothes on and then decide what to order online. I had a number of blice (blouses to those of you who are
I’ve been in email contact with Pradeep Soundararajan for a few months now. He was recently at a conference in Toronto, and has posted his The (bad) state of software testing interviews in India, which includes a pdf of a talk he gave about interviewing. He has several wonderful ideas, including: Candidate and interview myths
I was speaking with a potential client about their approach to knowledge management. They think they need a senior person to organize a top-down appoach, and build a custom tool, so they know what knowledge they want to manage and have a place to put it. I don’t think that’s going to work. That approach
Jurgen interviewed me via email, 5 Easy Questions for Johanna Rothman. The questions were not easy!
Art Petty has a great post, Capturing Talent and Creating Great Customer Experiences: They Go Together. I really liked this part: A manager that takes mid-interview smoke breaks and badgers a talented candidate about salary expectations is someone that I want working for my competitor. I’m still astounded when I hear stories like that.
I recently met a lead whose business card read “Lead Phoenix Developer.” I asked what that meant, and he explained that he was a technical lead for an project code-named Phoenix. His business card could have read “Lead Developer” or “Technical Lead” and made much more sense. This almost happened to me today. I’m the
John Cook wrote a blog post, Scaling the number of projects, that starts addressing the issue of why it’s everyone’s job to manage their own project portfolios. Here’s an example of the problem he’s noticed: It sounds easy to manage independent projects: if the projects are for different clients and they have different developers, just