I have options for all kinds of work I want to do today: The creative work, which includes a wide variety of writing (articles, blog posts, and yes, more books) and more workshops Paperwork. Yes, I have accounting and all kinds of spreadsheet reconciliation. Client preparation work for when they return from their summer vacations. […]
I’ve heard that the AA/PMI wants to create a manifesto for enterprise agility. I’m not sure we need a manifesto, but that’s fine. Here are the necessary conditions for enterprise agility: A culture of flow efficiency thinking. That means everyone collaborates across the organization to optimize up for one overarching goal. Limited planning horizons, with
Does your organization use a PMO as a way to manage the various P functions: project, program, and portfolio management? Plenty of organizations do use PMOs. However, I rarely see them as effective in furthering the organization’s operational excellence or the strategy. Instead, I too often see them as yet another function that creates delays
If you are like most people I know, you have way too many meetings. That leads to an overcrowded calendar and delayed decisions. Worse, it means the time you spend in meetings prevents you from doing “your” work, whatever that work is. That’s especially important the more responsibility you have. The greater your responsibility, the
Pawel Brodzinski has a terrific LinkedIn post about the value of hiring women. In his experience, they stay longer than the men. That means the investment the company makes in these people has a longer payback time. That’s an example of a safe hiring decision. That’s been my experience, too. But I didn’t just hire
Your managers want to measure all kinds of interesting pieces of data to run the company well. Much of that is reflected in your organization’s Profit and Loss (P&L) statement. (There’s a great site with an explanation of a P&L statement.) Notice any organization’s three big numbers: Revenue, all the operating expenses, and net earnings.
Have you seen the Forbes article that has zero idea how efficient engineering teams work? They have a whole long list of “inefficiencies”. This is a quote from that article: Marking oneself as “in a meeting” on Slack Scheduling communications (Slack messages, emails, and code commits) for off-hours to appear active Blocking out private calendar
I keep seeing too much micromanagement in organizations. That’s where managers decide for the people they lead and serve, not with the people they lead and serve. Micromanagement creates several problems: People stop learning how to solve problems because the manager steps in to tell them what to do. That leads to much lower throughput,
I’ve seen a number of posts recently saying that micromanagement isn’t as bad as we might think it is. Instead, micromanagement might actually help the person who’s the subject of that micromanagement. Sorry, no. Well, not sorry at all. Still No. Heck, NO. NO to all micromanagement. If any manager has micromanaged you, you know
For years, managers have been trying to find ways to make software product development faster and easier. As an industry, we’ve tried tons of things. Here are just the one I’ve experienced in the 70s, 80s, 90s: Structured Analysis and Design. (That was the precursor to Big Design Up Front.) The SEI’s Capability Maturity Model