©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
©1999 Johanna Rothman “The Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42” –. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Some people think there’s a specific answer to questions such as: “What’s the correct staffing ratio for developers to testers in a software development organization?” “What’s the best project management
©1999 Johanna Rothman I just read an article by a well-known author. He claimed that your first project slip isn’t so bad; the third or fourth project slips are the bad ones. In my mind, red flags went up. I flipped the bozo bit on the author. I completely disagree with his conclusion. The first
©1999 Johanna Rothman I was recently at a presentation at which a well-known measurement guru spoke. He said that most people don’t know the value of a basic measurement: the cost to fix a defect. I was surprised, so at the next few conferences, I asked people in my presentations how much it cost their
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. Abstract Companies create a variety of products, and different releases of those products, for many reasons. These range from market-testing trial balloons disguised as ‘beta tests’ to releases forced by incompatible changes in operating systems. Some have many changes, some have few. Some can tolerate fairly glaring defects, others have to
© 1999 Johanna Rothman “When will the project be ready for Beta?” “I think it will be ready next month. We’re more than 90% done.” “NEXT MONTH? You said ‘next month’ last month. You said you were more than 90% done last month too. We’re slipping this project a month every month. WHEN will you