MPD

MPD

Orasi Webinars Posted

The Orasi folks have posted my fall webinars, both the audio and PDF presentation. If you missed What Makes a Great Product Manager? Managing the Project Portfolio Delivering the Right Product on Time: Setting Expectations between Engineering and the Three PMs check out the webinars.

agile, MPD

What Agile Isn't

In the immortal words of Dilbert/Scott Adams, “Agile programming doesn’t just mean doing more work with fewer people.” See today’s cartoon.

MPD, risk

Project Complexity is Really About Your Project's Risks

  One of my students emailed me recently, asking about how to assess project complexity. He said, “I think it would be pretty neat and also quite useful if you could define a project as say a .60 Apollos or what have you… I don’t imagine it would be at all easy to come up

management, MPD

Give Feedback Directly

  In my project management class a few weeks ago, I did an activity on feedback. In my experience, many project managers are also functional managers, so they need to give feedback. And, in highly collaborative teams, the person called “manager” isn’t the only one to give and receive feedback. One team got stuck. One

MPD, writing

Hey! You! See? So…

I’m reviewing an article from a long-time colleague who’s just started to write. He has great ideas. And the way he’s packaged his ideas (the writing part) doesn’t do justice to them. There’s a mnemonic* I use (when I remember 🙂 to help me package my ideas better. It’s Hey! You! See? So… Hey! grabs

MPD, requirements

Single Point Requirements Require Iteration

Don has a great post on Single Point Requirements. You get one example of the requirements: “This product needs to do this. Just this.” Sure enough some months (or years) later, that single example is not sufficiently general to do everything you want the product to do. That’s ok, as long as you plan to

MPD, workshop

Teaching Project Management and Management with Activities

  A couple of weeks ago (yes, I know I’m behind :-), Scott Berkun asked in Teaching programming / management the Harvard way“Anyone have examples of CASE or situation based courses for managers, designers and programmers? Undergraduate or graduate?” Yes, Scott, I do. When I teach program management and software methodology (at the graduate level

MPD

Making Progress Visible

Mike Kelly posted some reflections on Behind Closed Doors: Making Progress Visible. I love it when people understand why their managers are asking questions.

implement by feature, MPD, schedule

"Complete" and "Freeze" Aren't

  I had a discussion recently with a manager who was concerned about his developers meeting their milestones. “We have “Code Complete” as a milestone. The developers say they meet it, but that just means they wrote code until the milestone date. The code isn’t complete. I can’t even tell how complete it is.” Ah,

Scroll to Top