I’ve been thinking about project retrospectives. Too few project teams participate in end-of-the-project retrospectives, and to few managers arrange for them. My clients seem concerned by the price of an outside facilitator and the cost in time to the next project. To address the facilitator cost, I’ve suggested that any facilitator not on the […]
Take a look at Success Through Failure. I really liked this: Software development is difficult in the best of conditions. You should always be failing some of the time, and learning from those failures in an honest way. Otherwise, you’re cheating yourself out of the best professional development opportunities. How do you ask about mistakes
If you’ve been hiring for a while, you probably have a list of questions you like to use with candidates. I certainly do. So let me ask you, “Can you give me an example of a time when you wanted to learn more about a candidate, and your questions didn’t seem to work?” Notice what
Frank sent me the music baton. I don’t do chain letters, but I thought this was cute. Sorry, Frank, I’m still going to relate it to work.The official stuff: Total volume of music on my computer: 1128 songs (or 3.2 days, 5.23 GB) The last CD I bought: I can’t remember if it was Saturday
Well, all the comments on my No More Bugs post got me thinking. To answer a few comments here and elsewhere, I’m not trying to blame developers for being human and making mistakes. When I was a developer, most of my mistakes involved code. As a manager, most of my mistakes were in my dealings
My Inc./Fast Company column is up: Put Your Candidate to Work. Please leave comments here. When I write columns for a site or magazine, I discuss the areas to write about with the editor. What the editors originally wanted was a here’s-how-to-use-your-intuition article about hiring. I explained that was a bad idea, and I would
Esther just called me from the Orlando airport to tell me she heard a fascinating rumor: Supposedly, she and I aren’t talking! After I was done laughing out loud, we examined this a little. We’ve facilitated sessions together at previous year’s STAR conferences, but I’ve been unable to attend last fall’s STAR and this spring’s
During an email conversation last week, I suggested that my client change his naming of “bug” to “defect.” He asked why. People don’t create bugs, but people create defects (or problems or faults). Bugs crawl in or fly in from the outside, when you’re not expecting them to. But we expect defects and problem in
I was reading Good Interview Questions. I was a bit surprised by the first question: State, Strategy, Bridge, and Adapter are all similar patterns. How are they similar, and how are they different? But I suspect I was surprised because I’m no longer a developer and am not familiar with the patterns. I suspect I
I’ll be guest blogging on Recruiting.com. I don’t have the magic password yet, so you’ll have to wait until next week to see anything I write. I had a great email and then phone conversation with Jason. I explained I wasn’t a recruiter, and only knew about recruiting from the client side. He said that