After my presentation last night at the Detroit PMI chapter, an attendee asked me, “Is context switching really as bad as you say it is?” Yes, it is. I believe Weinberg’s estimate of losing 10-20% of possible work-time every time you attempt to take on one more project. And, if you read Hal’s entry today, […]
When we have recessions (or whatever this economic slowdown is), people lose their jobs. At first, the marginal people lose their jobs, along with people who made bad job choices. However, since the layoffs started in the high tech industry, more experienced people are losing their jobs and have stopped looking for technical jobs. One
Via Steve Norrie’s weblog, I found Kovitz’s “Hidden Skills that Support Phased and Agile Requirements Engineering”. In phased development, projects promise large feature sets to a customer for future delivery. In agile projects, the requirements are refined over numerous little conversations with the customer, day in, day out. Kovitz claims the skills required for agile
On the AYE conference wiki, Jerry Weinberg said this: “no iteration should be so big that you can’t afford to throw it away if it doesn’t come out right in the end.” The longer the iteration, the less likely you can recover the project (or re-steer it, or re-guide it to an appropriate direction).
In a previous post, Attracting Suitable Candidates, Laurent caught me being vague. In Screening Out, he points to a great skit, where the technical people are talking about people skills but the HR people are talking about tools and technology.Too many recruiters just don’t get it — that software is much more people and perseverance
Bloglet subscribers saw two posts from me Friday. They saw the post I published *and* the post I saved as a draft. Surprised me. Since I know about this feature, I’ll work around it, and compose future drafts somewhere else. This isn’t a big-deal problem for me. But it was a surprise, and a
In Sunday’s Boston Globe View from the Cube column, Lisa Liberty Becker claims “Telling the truth can be hazardous to your job”. She goes on to talk about her husband, a performance test engineer, whose manager buried his reports, because “they [the reports] reflect poorly on the job he’s done.” The result? Bad product performance,
In my travels last week, I contracted a cold. And of course, life doesn’t stop just because I have a cold and my brain doesn’t work. I still have writing, phone calls, consulting, and driving to manage. I managed to ask for help with the writing. As soon as anyone heard me on the phone,
I had a heated discussion last week with a hiring manager. He was convinced games and puzzles helped him discriminate between suitable and unsuitable candidates. I told him I’d probably fail the games he had for project managers. “Uh, what do you mean the games for project managers?” “Don’t you have separate games or puzzles
Earlier this week, I was at SPC teaching about project requirements and project management. If you haven’t thought about lifecycles, consider the differences between these kinds of lifecycles: Linear: Waterfall and waterfall with feedback Iterative: Spiral, where the whole product is up for grabs each time Incremental: Where you add to the product in pieces