I coached a manager who’d hired seven people in the previous year–and had fired five of them. His manager was ready to toss him out, too. Instead, the senior manager decided this manager needed coaching about how to hire people. When I asked the manager about his interviewing style, he explained that he used what […]
So you thought the project was on schedule. And now, someone in power has requested you finish the project earlier. Earlier than you can manage with the people you’ve got.You have a bunch of options, including moving to 2-4 week iterations. But that’s something I would normally discuss on Managing Product Development 🙂 So, here
I was at the Better Software conference last week, met a bunch of great people (including Jim Shore and Joel Spolsky). Another important person is someone who’s not famous–and important nevertheless. A senior tester explained her situation and asked for some help. “Most of our testers can’t read code. And, we don’t know what
A reader was reading Characteristics of Great Project Managers and asked, “Do you feel that to be a great Project Manager one need not know completely about the technology involved?” No. Project managers need to understand enough about the technology so that they can make tradeoff decisions (or help product owners make tradeoff decisions) about
Imagine this scenario: You’re a development manager in a small organization. You have a product and a couple of customers. Over the course of the next year or so, you add a few more developers and a few more customers. And, your customers want to know when you’ll improve the quality of the product, because
When I teach project management, I ask the participants to create a project charter (See my templates page for one I use to start). I recently encountered a battered project manager who does not have a project charter for a project with 6 or 7 sub-projects. This PM is smart, but has never managed a
Since Esther and I started advertising our One-on-One workshop, I’ve been hearing wonderful stories about how managers and team members have benefited from one-on-one meetings. Here are some: A tester said he’d been ready to give notice when his manager started doing regular one-on-ones. WIth the advent of one-on-ones, his relationship with his manager
Ok, I sometimes extrapolate trends from little or no data, so be forewarned 🙂 Daughter #1 is graduating from high school this Sunday. We went to the awards ceremony last night. There were typical awards in memory/honor of so-and-so, and a whole bunch of recognition awards. But what I was pleasantly surprised at was the
If you’ve ever been involved in a startup before the startup had competitors or were part of a disruptive change in technology, you’ve needed this hiring strategy. In this case, technical skills are close to irrelevant. What’s really important when you’re starting a disruptive change or you’re hiring a not-quite-known skill set is to specify
Esther Schindler posted a great review of Hiring the Best, called Fluff-Free, Pragmatic IT Hiring Advice. She even linked the book to a hiring mistake she’d made earlier in her career. Thanks, Esther!