Oh dear. I was not sufficiently articulate in my last post. Both Frank and David in their comments asked about capacity, the output of the organization over time. That will teach me to post when I’m tired. (Maybe.) Let me try this again. In each of these projects, senior management wanted more features than
A client was optimizing for what they thought was the bottleneck in their software development: the testers. In the assessment, I gathered some quantitative data about how long the testers took to test and how long it took for the other groups to perform their work. (They used a phased lifecycle.) The testers were
I was talking to a hiring manager recently, and she said, “I’d like to get another developer just like Stan.” Well, Stan is a good guy and a talented developer, but why look for someone just like him? The manager explained, “I’m staffing a particularly risky project and with someone just like Stan, I know
David Anderson has an intriguing post, Lawyers, Unit Tests and Performance Reviews. David says “Individual team members can be set specific goals and behavior objectives…” and gives examples. I prefer that team members set their own goals with input from their managers. But the key here is that a technical person should be looking to
I have a column this week on Stickyminds, Multiprojecting: The Illusion of Progress. Thank you Frank Patrick, for naming this kind of multi-tasking (and for reviewing the work-in-progress). Feel free to comment on Stickyminds, unless you want to comment here.
Thanks to Brian, I discovered this gem on resumes and first impressions. I especially like the first point: “Concise – keep it short and to the point. Tell us about your accomplishments as well as your responsibilities. Don’t spend a lot of time talking about strategy, the product, or the company.” Someone with four years
Ok, I admit it. I have this strange fascination with “The Apprentice.” This morning on the “Today” show, Donald Trump and Matt Lauer “interviewed” 8 candidates to be on “The Apprentice” next season. (If you’re watching for interview tips, stop. Watch for the entertainment value 🙂 I heard one fabulous interview question: “Do you love
About 15 months ago, Denise Robitaille and I met for lunch. Denise was explaining how she helped her clients implement a reasonable corrective action program. I explained how I’d helped some of my clients figure out what was really wrong when they had problems. We were struck by the similarities of our approaches. So,
There are two kinds of domain expertise: solution-space and problem-space. When a candidate understands the technical issues behind how your product solves the customers’ problems, that’s solution-space domain expertise. When a candidate intimately understands the problems your product is trying to solve, that’s problem-space domain expertise. One kind of domain expertise does not imply the
Program management is the art of managing an effort of multiple projects with multiple deliverables. If you google “Program Management,” you’ll see a bunch of interesting posts, including Chris Pratley’s Program Management. To me, Chris is describing project management, albeit of a large project. When Chris talks about his “program” management, he’s discussing the coordination