Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
In my travels last week, I contracted a cold. And of course, life doesn’t stop just because I have a cold and my brain doesn’t work. I still have writing, phone calls, consulting, and driving to manage. I managed to ask for help with the writing. As soon as anyone heard me on the …
Earlier this week, I was at SPC teaching about project requirements and project management. If you haven’t thought about lifecycles, consider the differences between these kinds of lifecycles: Linear: Waterfall and waterfall with feedback Iterative: Spiral, where the whole product is up for grabs each time Incremental: Where you add to the product in …
I’m at the Software Development conference this week. One of the hot topics I discussed in my presentations and with attendees during and after the talks were about context switching and multitasking, Focused Performance and Breakthrough Thinking on Worker Productivity and Multi-tasking Makes you Stupid, studies say.We agreed that: several pieces of work at different …
I was on the phone this morning with a senior manager. He was describing their current project: “Well, we’ve got 25 people: 12 developers, 6 testers, 2 writers, 4 support people, and 1 project manager.” I asked about the managers of the developers and testers. “Oh, the dev manager is running the project. We …
Continue reading “Choose When to Separate People Management From Project Management”
I seem to have a vision theme happening this week 🙂 How many kinds of review do you perform on your project’s work products? Especially with software projects, it makes sense to review interim work products, so you have some idea about how good the final product could be. Sometimes when I ask project …
I was working on a newsletter article about how to see your project’s progress, and got stuck. It’s easier to see project progress on a project with a tangible deliverable; it’s much harder for software or a service project. So, I took a break and read Esther Derby’s blog entry, Start Seeing Software from …
Sometimes, it’s not clear that you should fund or staff a project. If you’re not sure how to discriminate between alternative projects, here are four questions to ask: What’s the strategic reason behind this project? (Does the strategic reason behind the project change the importance of the project?) How does this project fit into …
I’m facilitating a roundtable, Test Management 101, on Stickyminds, and someone just posted a question about how to measure testers to show return on investment: measuring the number of defects they find. Ouch. When you measure developers on the number of lines of code, or testers on the number of defects, or carpenters on …
Continue reading “Single-Dimension Measurements: How NOT to measure technical staff”
Fred Brooks, in his classic, “The Mythical Man-Month,” talks about a chief programmer team (chief programmer, and programmers of lesser hierarchy until you get to the peon). The chief programmer team works when one person can keep all the details about the product in their head. If you use several hierarchical teams of chief …
Continue reading “Agile Practices Create Non-Hierarchical Teams”
Sometimes on a project, we focus on an intermediate milestone in the project, such as Beta, or first performance test, or early ship. The project team works like dogs to make that intermediate milestone. Then, there’s still the rest of the project. Uh oh. Now you’re starting to cross the desert. (Thanks to Jack …
Continue reading “Manage to the End of the Project – Avoid Crossing the Desert”