I was a reference for a senior manager the other day. A lovely HR person called and asked me a bunch of generic questions about the senior manager. Unfortunately, she didn’t ask me any of the important questions. It sounded as if her reference check was a standard set of questions, usable for anyone in […]
I’m at the AYE conference this week, and a bunch of fellow bloggers are here: Laurent Bossavit, Esther Derby, Steve Smith, Ron Pihlgren, Willem van den Ende, Dale Emery. I hope I haven’t forgotten anyone. Laurent suggested a blogging BOF (Birds of a Feather), so if we’re not too exhausted, we’ll sit around one of
With a little common sense and some dependable metrics, you can banish the “bug bucket” and keep the dreaded rework monster under control by creating a reasonable prediction of your project’s end. A reader recently asked me, “When planning a project phase, how do you account for the bugs that you know will be created?
I’m at the STAR West conference this week. I presented a tutorial, “Becoming a Great Test Manager,” and keynoted this morning, “Managing the Management Balancing Act.” Esther and I are facilitating two dialogues sessions, so the week is full. I hope to post more late this week or over the weekend.
When we talk to new managers, we ask them, “How many of you received management training?” Fewer than 50% raise their hands. As an industry, we don’t do a great job of grooming managers. Sure there are exceptions—bosses who mentor and develop the people in their groups to move into management and companies with strong
Last night at my SPIN talk someone came up to me at the end of the talk. I’d discussed earned value and inch-pebbles in my talk but hadn’t specifically discussed how to avoid the dreaded “percent complete” reporting problem to management. The percent complete problem occurs when you have to report progress to management as
If you manage people, at some point, you’re going to deal with titles and job descriptions. Here are my perceptions about the constraints on titles: Make sure the titles for developers, testers, writers, anyone who performs project construction are parallel. That is, don’t have junior testers unless you also have junior developers. Make sure the
The Boston area still isn’t over the Red Sox loss last week, and one good thing to arise from their loss is a discussion of management decisions. In A cautionary tale: management counts, Douglas Eisenhart says “If you think management doesn’t have an impact on a team’s performance, think again.” Eisenhart then discusses Grady
On the face of it, higher productivity looks like a Good Thing. More products for less time. Who wouldn’t want this? But I wonder about this search for higher productivity. What do managers really want? If you want to understand about productivity for software organizations, read Putnam and Myers’ new book, Five Core Metrics:
Here’s a list of the top ten questions interviewers ask. (How do they know??) I really like the way these questions are framed in behavior-description style. I have a nit to pick with question 2: What did you like best and least about your previous job? I don’t think that’s a question about administrative and