Last Tuesday, I had a blast at Boston SPIN. I led a roundtable about transitioning to agile, and discovered that not everyone takes the feedback the timebox gives them. In this case, people weren’t finishing what they “attempted to commit to” in the timebox, but they extended the timebox. I suggested that was not such
Jurgen asked me to help publicize his survey. Ok, I’ve done it. Now, let me rant about explain why I think surveys like this are not useful, and may be harmful. A survey does not take your context into account. Surveys about any practices without considering the industry, the products, and the management don’t tell
I’ve been writing this post forever (for a month), and finally deleted that one and have started over again. We had over 1500 submissions, so the stage producers and review teams made the difficult decisions when they accepted about 20% for the program. (Difficult is not nearly descriptive enough. Complex, merciless, intricate, knotty are helpful
There’s a discussion on a mailing list about a partially committed-to project: there aren’t enough people on the project, the people don’t have the time to do the work because they are interrupted all the time by support of previously released applications. The only people available are part-time people who are not available when the
I’m trying to clean up the project portfolio management book for technical review, and I realized the other night (well, morning, when I woke up), that I’d missed explaining a key idea. We all work on several kinds of projects: Projects that maintain the organization, the kind we need to run. These projects “keep the
Jack has an intriguing post, The fun of productivity measures. He ponders how to measure knowledge workers. For software project teams, it’s easy: the number of running, tested features over time. The features have to be complete. No partial credit for partially done features. But what about for managers? That’s a little trickier. I like
I’m writing for gantthead.com this year, about agile and lean project portfolio management. My first article was posted back when I was so sick. See The Game of Risk. You can leave comments there, or if you prefer, here.
Last week, at SD West, I led a 3-hour coaching tutorial. I got lucky. Dave Nicolette and Mike Vizdos participated. (I love it when my peers join me in a tutorial!) Dave reminded us that “explaining with examples” are a great way to coach. You take a recent example of some occurrence that strikes you
I’ve been sick for weeks, and am finally coming out of it to be close to healthy. (I was still coughing in the 8-degree Fahrenheit cold leaving the gym. Oh well.) One of the problems is that my work doesn’t stop if I’m sick. I bet yours doesn’t either. Daughter #2 asked last night if
The project portfolio book is in Beta! For those of you who have not heard of a Pragmatic Bookshelf Beta book, here are the limitations: It’s not laid out correctly Although I’ve looked for typos, I have not discovered and fixed them all The bibliography is not yet included (it will be on later betas,