I was under the weather last week, and am finally well enough to think. I still have the raspy voice from coughing all week, but you can’t hear me. Since I worked out this morning, my brain is actually firing on all cylinders. I signed a contract with Pragmatic Bookshelf for my next book about […]
Summary: Long-time advocate of status reports, Johanna Rothman has come across a new way of reporting the movement of a project using something we experience every day—the weather. In this week’s column, she sheds a little sunshine on this new technique, which demonstrates the status of a project a lot like meteorologists announce current weather
Summary: Drawing up a to-do list sounds like a logical starting point when you want to prioritize your workload. But if you have an extra-long list of tasks, the list you should start with is the not-to-do list. Doing so forces you to take an extra hard look at what you’re doing and if you should
Summary: Knowing how much work your group can accomplish–and how much it takes to complete that work–is critical to your success as a manager. In this week’s column, Johanna Rothman explains how to ascertain your team’s potential and how to use that information to define and manage your project portfolio so it doesn’t manage you. I
Part of my consulting practice is to perform assessments. Sometimes, those assessments discover misalignments between IT and the business. Misalignments show up as “problem” projects, “inadequate” testing, and other typical problems in IT. It turns out, though, that many IT misalignment problems can be solved by small changes in IT work processes. With 10 years
I have finally gone back through all of my older blog entries and attached tags to them. This should help if you think you read something here, and can’t remember exactly what it was called.
I’ve been working with managers of varying stripes, and a middle manager was proudly explaining how he deals with getting people’s attention at meetings. “I get a big bucket and put it on a chair next to the door. Everyone dumps their cell phones or Blackberries or pagers in the bucket. It’s kind of like
I was talking with a new manager recently, and she was explaining what she had to tell a new employee (a co-op, but an employee). “I told him he had to be here by 9am every day he works. He can eat lunch from 12 to 1, and then he should be back at his
Dave Christiansen wrote a lovely article, Plan a Better Project. He mentions Manage It!. Thanks, Dave.
I have a lot of recruiter contacts, especially through recruitingblogs.com. I’m planning a Q&A series with recruiters, and would like to know from you: what do you want to learn from recruiters? Email me or leave your questions in the comments here.