One of my students emailed me recently, asking about how to assess project complexity. He said, “I think it would be pretty neat and also quite useful if you could define a project as say a .60 Apollos or what have you… I don’t imagine it would be at all easy to come up
Last week, at the AYE Conference, I led a workshop called “Conversations with Candidates.” One of the participants wanted to know, “How do I build off a behavior-description question?” I’ve always led the conversations intuitively, so I had to think for a minute to describe what I do. If the next questions doesn’t just come
In my project management class a few weeks ago, I did an activity on feedback. In my experience, many project managers are also functional managers, so they need to give feedback. And, in highly collaborative teams, the person called “manager” isn’t the only one to give and receive feedback. One team got stuck. One
I’m reviewing an article from a long-time colleague who’s just started to write. He has great ideas. And the way he’s packaged his ideas (the writing part) doesn’t do justice to them. There’s a mnemonic* I use (when I remember 🙂 to help me package my ideas better. It’s Hey! You! See? So… Hey! grabs
Don has a great post on Single Point Requirements. You get one example of the requirements: “This product needs to do this. Just this.” Sure enough some months (or years) later, that single example is not sufficiently general to do everything you want the product to do. That’s ok, as long as you plan to
I’m guest blogging this week on computerworld.com. It’s different from what I normally post here.
My quarterly Stickyminds column, How Much Work Can You Do? is up. Hope you read and comment.
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
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
Mike Kelly posted some reflections on Behind Closed Doors: Making Progress Visible. I love it when people understand why their managers are asking questions.