I have a colleague—a development manager—who blogs about once every week or two, speaks at one or two conferences each year, and gives local talks to professional groups in his area. He says candidates send him email asking for a job. Not all those candidates are reasonable candidates for his open positions, but many are. […]
Imagine this scenario: Your organization has moved to cross-functional, project-based teams, and you, once a developer, are now a project manager. You understand how to make development work, but testing is like a black box. Until now, you thought testing was something that other people—those in the testing group—did. Now you’re responsible for the testers’
I’m proud to announce that Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management is a Jolt Award finalist. Andy made a short video you might like to see. I’m excited. Manage It! is up against other fine books, so there’s no guarantee it will win an award. But it’s very exciting to have made
Tom Cagley, of Software Process and Measurement fame, interviewed me a couple of weeks ago. The podcast is here. Enjoy!
Recruiters are people, too. But when they do something not-so-bright, candidates tend to flip the bozo bit–not just on the recruiter, but on the company also. A colleague is looking for a job. His resume clearly states 5 years at BigCompany. Recruiter from BigCompany sends him email in response to his resume posted on a
Daniel Steinberg, my editor for Manage It! interviewed me a couple of weeks ago. The podcast is here. We discussed some of the issues I’ve seen in organizations on projects. Some of the ideas we discussed were: What does the project manager do, even for an agile project? Has anything changed in project management? What
There’s an car dealership advertising a multiple-point certification for pre-owned vehicles. To me that translates into “checklist for used cars.” That’s what a certification for people based on book knowledge is also–a checklist that a person knew the right answer. Nothing about the experience or if the experience that led to that knowledge was successful.
I’ve also used Agile life cycles (Scrum with different size timeboxes) in combination on a project. Here, the developers in the corporate location had a series of features that were big. I did suggest they break the features apart into smaller chunks for ease of estimation and implementation, but they didn’t want to 🙂 The
I’ve used another variation on multiple life cycles, especially for larger projects where the project staff or project management didn’t want to or know how to use an agile life cycle. This combination life cycle has two incremental pieces. The developers (at the top of the picture) use Staged Delivery. Since this is not an
I’m not a purist. I use whatever tools make sense for the context I’m in, and when it comes to organizing projects, I use whatever life cycles–in whatever combination–make sense to me. In response to a mailing list query, here are ways I’ve used life cycles for a few projects. Let’s assume you’re collaborating with