I’ve learned about schedule games from lots of people and projects. Here is the list of acknowledgements, as I remember them. If I left anyone off, please let me know. We had a discussion of schedule games on the AYE wiki, which helped me remember just how many games there are. I’m pretty sure I
You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m not enamored of project scheduling tools. And since I most often do rolling wave planning, I don’t normally need a scheduling tool. But, here’s another true story. I was coaching a PM in an organization where the execs only understood the waterfall lifecycle. They thought iterating was a
One of my clients claimed he had ADHD. He had trouble keeping projects focused on one goal. I’ve known him for a while, and he didn’t have this problem when he was a project manager. Nope, he made sure that each project he managed had a goal, and beware any senior manager who wanted to
My colleague, Will, has been attempting to hire developers. He’s a bit frustrated. Take a look at Explaining the tech job market. Will is frustrated with the level of competence he’s seeing in candidates. That prompted him to discover Parnas’s Law of Hiring: Parnas’s Law: The more incompetent developers you hire, the more you need.
You and I know that the schedule is an estimate. The project schedule is your best guess about when the project team will reach which milestones, and when the project may complete. But a schedule is not a prediction; it is a guess. So when I meet senior managers who want a project team
For some unknown-to-me-reason, more and more hiring managers appear to be attempting to do their own recruiting. While I do encourage hiring managers to network and constantly be on the lookout for candidates, especially passive candidates, I can’t see how a hiring manager can effectively perform the management job and recruit for candidates.If you’re in
You’re a project manager. Your project is proceeding fairly well. You’ve had a few bumps, but you’re making progress. You come into work one day, and there’s a message to meet with the Big Cheese. Big Cheese says, “Stop working on that project. Start on this one!” Not only does this happen once, it
Sometimes, I work with organizations where there’s an implicit agreement not to discuss the schedule. I’ve seen this schedule game in two flavors: the first is Dream Time, where the project team and management believe the schedule, especially if it’s in a scheduling tool with lots of graphs and different colored lines. The other is
Anthony points to Lou Adler’s One Question Interview. The one question is Please think about your most significant accomplishment. Now, could you tell me all about it? That’s a great stepping off question. And, I really like the second question, in one of the comments on Anthony’s post, by Jim Durbin Tell me about the
A few years ago, I received a call to help out a project in trouble. Unsurprisingly, when I was reviewing what had been done and what still left to do, the PM explained there were many half-implemented features. (The team had not been implementing by feature, but instead by architecture. Each architecture group had