© 2000 Johanna Rothman A recent client, Bob, asked me to assess their major project. “Johanna, it’s so late, I don’t know what to do. If we don’t get it out on time, we’ll miss the market window. I can’t believe any of the estimates I get anymore, the project manager hasn’t met a single […]
©2000 Johanna Rothman Many of us are in “constant hiring” mode–continually receiving resumes, interviewing people, and deciding on whether to hire various candidates. Are you asking questions that get you informative answers about your candidates? There are many potential kinds of interview questions and situations: closed, open, hypothetical, meta questions, auditions, and rhetorical questions are
©2000 Johanna Rothman “I can’t make a decision today to save my life.” Susan, VP Engineering “Everything I touch today turns into garbage.” Joe, VP Engineering “I just want to hurt everyone when I can’t get anything done. Why should they have a good day, when I’m having a lousy day?” Cyril, CEO
© 2000 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Mass High Tech, 2000. “We’ll sell some consulting along with our product, until we’re making enough revenue. Then we’ll phase out the consulting, and be just a product company.” — senior manager at a Boston-area web-based startup Many startup software/web-based companies decide on a business model
© (2000) Johanna Rothman and 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 Johanna
© 2000 Johanna Rothman. Abstract Many of us would like a precise answer to the question: “What’s the correct staffing ratio for developers to testers in my product development organization?” Usually though, the only answer is “It depends”. Your answer depends on your situation: the kind of project you’re working on, your schedule constraints, the
© 2000 Johanna Rothman. Abstract Process improvement projects can be difficult to start, keep on track, and assess results. We can use the same requirements gathering and specification techniques that we use on product-projects on our process improvement projects. This paper discusses how to define requirements for process improvement projects and how to use reviews
by Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor, December 8, 1999. I was recently with a client that was having trouble completing its high-level design spec for a key internal system. The spec the designer delivered was 50 pages of dense text in a small type size. The sponsor refused to read
by Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Software Devleopment Magazine, December 1999. I’ve had great managers, and I’ve had lousy managers. The great managers always seemed to be pushing forward, solving problems and thinking about better ways to do things. The lousy managers repeated their mistakes on project after project; they claimed to
Abstract 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, you don’t have