As a younger project manager, I had a conversation with my boss. “We can’t meet your schedule. Here’s what it’s going to take.” My boss said, “You can’t be serious about not meeting my schedule. I’m sure if you just put your mind to it, you’ll meet the date.” My jaw dropped as he
My quarterly column at Stickyminds is up today. It’s called Estimating Testing Time.
A few years ago, a senior manager called me. “We have a project in trouble. We started off hopeful, but now it looks impossible.” I asked a few questions, and discovered they had never done a project like this before. It was bigger, in a different language, on a new platform, with a shorter
Louise Fletcher in What’s Your Email Address? says “Choose an address that is as bland and professional as possible.” Well, I don’t know that I would categorize a professional email address as bland, but then, I’m a geek. But I absolutely agree with Louise about the suitability of the email address she referred to “sexyeyes…”
I’ve been talking to a beleaguered colleague about his project schedule. “No matter what date I give them (senior management), they want an earlier date. I told them it doesn’t take nine women to make a baby in one month, I need some time for this project!” The Bring me a rock schedule game
I was a fortunate young developer. In my first three months at work, I ran into the 90% done schedule game. I did it to myself. I estimated a particular task was going to take 6 weeks. Of course, being an arrogant and naive developer, it never occurred to me to break the task
I’m thrilled to announce that you can see the announcement of Esther’s and my book, currently entitled Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management Revealed. Yes, this is the book we pair-wrote. We’re in the final stretch. First is working with Andy and Dave and whomever from Pragmatic Bookshelf to make sure we didn’t
I’ve been meaning to write a series of posts on schedule games, and a story I heard over the weekend has jolted me into writing about schedule chicken. I’m most familiar with schedule chicken that happens in meetings. Usually in a project status meeting, with the project manager and the project team, especially where
A reader, Mike, sent me this gem: Interview with the Intern. The lessons: Mind your language — particularly in the cover letter. I tend to give more benefit of the doubt with affect/effect. But I don’t have much patience with cover letters that misspell my name or the name of the company. Calm down. I’ve
Two different colleagues wrote me with similar conundrums. Their managers wants a “technical” project manager. One colleague was a hardware person, the other was a tester. They have both been managing software projects for several years. No one has told them they were ineffective. (I’ve discussed this issue before: The Difference Between Project Managers and