"How Much Work Can You Do?" Posted at Stickyminds
My quarterly Stickyminds column, How Much Work Can You Do? is up. Hope you read and comment.
MPD, Stickyminds columns
hiring strategy, HTP
Value, not Education or Experience
Experience and Education makes the point We hire people to complete tasks and run functions (not really–we employ talent to create value, but I?ll try to stick to the point). He goes on to say The problem is, both of these (years of experience and education) are unreliable measures of whether someone can do a
MPD, workshop
Teaching Project Management and Management with Activities
A couple of weeks ago (yes, I know I’m behind :-), Scott Berkun asked in Teaching programming / management the Harvard way“Anyone have examples of CASE or situation based courses for managers, designers and programmers? Undergraduate or graduate?” Yes, Scott, I do. When I teach program management and software methodology (at the graduate level
MPD
Making Progress Visible
Mike Kelly posted some reflections on Behind Closed Doors: Making Progress Visible. I love it when people understand why their managers are asking questions.
HTP, job analysis
Avoiding the Butterfly Effect
Amit Rathmore has a thought-provoking essay, Recruiting and the Butterfly Effect. His conclusion is that the people closest to the founding team need to be the ones interviewing candidates, so that the newest hires are as close the ideals and capabilities as the original hires. My only quibble with Amit is that this technique does
HTP, job analysis
Detecting Thinking Skills
Recently, a manager asked how he could detect critical thinking skills in candidates. I had to ask him more questions, so I could answer. Here’s what he meant by critical thinking skills: The ability to think through a problem in a certain architectural domain The ability to deal with people across the organization in planning
implement by feature, MPD, schedule
"Complete" and "Freeze" Aren't
I had a discussion recently with a manager who was concerned about his developers meeting their milestones. “We have “Code Complete” as a milestone. The developers say they meet it, but that just means they wrote code until the milestone date. The code isn’t complete. I can’t even tell how complete it is.” Ah,
HTP, interview
Guidelines for Candidates
Christian Sepulveda has a lovely post, Guidelines for Being a Strong Job Candidate. Some of his gems (these are all from his post): A prospective employer has no attention span whatsoever. You are selling yourself to an employer. What would make it a “no-brainer” to hire me? Notice his emphasis on communication skills given that
management, MPD
Drop the Bottom 10% of Your Work
Alan Weiss, author of Million Dollar Consulting, advises consultants to drop the bottom 10% of their work every year. That way you have to force yourself to grow and offer new (frequently more lucrative) offerings. The same advice applies to managers. When I teach management, I explain that managers have three responsibilities: To deliver
MPD
Behind Closed Doors Excerpt on Developer.*
If you don’t read developer.*, consider it. Dan has kindly placed an excerpt from Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. Enjoy!