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!
I’m the featured speaker at the next SIGIST event June 15. (I’ll be speaking at at a private event at Grove the next day.) Since I’m flying over on Tuesday, June 13, I expect to be awake enough for dinner on June 14. If you’ll be in London, and you want to get together for
Given the thoughtful comments on Architects Must Write Code and Testing Design, I’m wondering if some of the difference in our beliefs stem from our perceptions of the architect’s role. I see the architect as the technical lead who shepherds a product through the overall design, someone who explains enough about the system and
In Architects Must Write Code, several architects responded that I was too prescriptive (I’m summarizing their comments). Maybe. But I don’t think so. I’m in a nice hotel, where things just don’t work completely right. Yes, the hotel is clean (that’s the big thing with me). The hotel upgraded me to a suite with an
In addition to writing this blog, I also write Hiring Technical People. And, I’ve met a bunch of great recruiting-type people through that blog. One of them, Jim Durbin, has written a great review of Behind Closed Doors. He calls it “a reference manual for technical managers.”