The three-month project is over. The client is thrilled with your work. You go back to the office, create the invoice, drop it in the mail, and wait for the check to arrive. And wait, and wait, and wait. Finally, after two months, you call your client who promises to look into it. A week […]
© 1999 Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor, March 24, 1999. At a recent visit to an IT client, the new QA manager took me aside and said: “JR, here are the metrics I want to measure on a monthly basis. What do you think?” He had attempted to measure efficiency,
© 1999 Johanna Rothman and Brian Lawrence. Originally published in Software Testing and Quality Engineering, Mar./April 1999 Issue. A project manager strides purposefully into your office. “JB, this disk has the latest and greatest release of our software. Please test it.” You say “OK, OK. What does it do?” The manager stops in his tracks
© 1999 Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor, Feb. 3, 1999. Many IT managers are juggling too many projects and not enough staff. How do you make sure everyone’s focused on the right project? First, decide what’s most important for the business right now. Just because something was important at one
© 1999 Johanna Rothman To ensure a successful product in the marketplace, an organization must bring all the company’s functions together: Product development and testing, marketing, training, customer support, sales, etc. The manager who organizes and schedules the intra-company tasks is frequently called the program manager. One of my clients refers to program management as
© 1999 Johanna Rothman. You’ve written the job description. You know just what you want in this employee. You have one tiny problem-you just can’t find that person. Now what? Sometimes you can continue to wait for the right person to come along. Sometimes you choose to hire someone with inadequate skills. In either case,
©1999 Johanna Rothman Effectively using your influence is an art, the art of getting other people to do the things you want them to — and willingly. Many of us have opportunities to practice using our influence when we have responsibility for results, but not specific managerial authority. To be effective in these collaborative/consensus situations,
by Johanna Rothman. © 1999 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the
©1999 Johanna Rothman “With man’s great ability to think, reason, and compute, we can now pinpoint most of our current problems. The trouble is that we can’t solve them.” I walked in, and put my briefcase down. I fished out my dress shoes, and had one sneaker off before Ted barged in. “JR, I can’t
©1999 Johanna Rothman “Ship it!” Do you say these words with a feeling of pride? Or a feeling of desperation? For any project, the big question is “when will the project be ready to ship?” When is the project complete? You can’t know when the project is ready, unless you know what “complete” means. I