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.
I’m still catching up on posting links where either I or other people had aha moments: TMI’s One-on-Ones discusses a bunch of things about one-on-ones, something Esther and I have been talking about forever (as well as in Behind Closed Doors.) David Carlton explains how he adapted one-on-ones. (For the record, I love it when
My column at Recruitingtrends.com has evidently been up for a while, but I missed the email telling me. Gotta clean out that inbox. The column is: Using Writing and Speaking to Recruit Candidates, Part 2 You can’t leave comments there, so please do so here.
I ran a workshop recently about hiring for an agile team, and one of the people learning to interview said, “I want a candidate who can take criticism.” I replied, “Don’t you mean feedback?” He asked, “What’s the difference?” Oh, boy. Plenty. Criticism is when you you’re looking at a piece of code and you