Alan Weiss, author of Million Dollar Consulting, advises consultants to drop the bottom 10% of their work every year. That way you have to force yourself to grow and offer new (frequently more lucrative) offerings. The same advice applies to managers. When I teach management, I explain that managers have three responsibilities: To deliver
If you don’t read developer.*, consider it. Dan has kindly placed an excerpt from Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. Enjoy!
Recently, I gave a talk about useful practices–things to consider adopting/adapting in your organization. (I don’t believe in best practices, the idea that something could be best in all situations is just not credible. See UsefulPractices for more discussion. One of the techniques I discussed was creating smoke tests for the build. We started
I met someone at the Software Development conference this week who told me he had too many people to meet with them all–even on a biweekly basis. I asked him how many people he managed. “30.” That’s not a typo; that’s the number between 29 and 31. I asked why he had so many
I met a manager recently who relayed his technique for making sure his testers stayed focused on their jobs. “Our defect-tracking system logs people off after 30 minutes of idle time. If they’re logged off, I know they’re not working.” This was a new one for me. I’ve heard of counting lines of code.
I taught a management tutorial at the Better Software conference this week. One of the points I discussed (and asked participants to discuss) was delegation. The managers in my tutorial said they ran into these problems when trying to delegate: Being too concerned with how the delegatee did the work, not the results. Wanting people
I received my copies of Behind Closed Doors, and here at the Better Software conference, the bookstore has books. I’m still very excited.
I gave a talk entitled “Predicting Project Completion” at the Central Mass chapter of the PMI last night. I had some suggestions about techniques to generate and discuss schedule estimates. Then, to practice a little, I asked the audience to become participants and practice a simulation. The simulation is to first estimate how long
If you’ve wanted to catch some of my presentations but were unable to make it to a conference or one of my speaking engagements, you have three opportunities this fall that don’t require you to leave your desk. I’ll be doing a series of webinars for Orasi, about the impact of people and relationships
I’ve been watching, reading, and listening to the Katrina coverage over the past week. And the one thing that stands out for me is my perception that there was a lack of disaster planning. I’m not going to play the blame game–there’s plenty to go around. But here are the questions I would have