I’m in Albuquerque this week at a debriefing workshop. When I teach, I don’t just read PowerPoint slides. I do use handouts (and frequently PPT) to guide what I’m going to say. However, I add lots of stories, and use interactive activities to drive specific points home to the workshop participants. The way to extract
My Stickyminds column, What’s on Your Not-to-do List? is posted. Please do leave comments there (or here if you like). This column is based on one of the ideas in Behind Closed Doors.
We talk blithely about the “crisis” in software development or IT. But most of the time, that’s just projects over schedule, over budget, and under featured. Real project crises are about people. I heard that one of my clients died today. She was a young-ish project manager. I’d never met her in person (she
Esther and I are editing (the next-to-final pass, we think) the book this week, integrating comments from our reviewers. We are very fortunate; our reviewers provided wonderful feedback. And some of the feedback we’re not going to use — at least, not in this book. One of the hardest things to do, whether it’s
I’ve changed a few things about this blog: I enabled each post to be its own archive. You can click on the title or on the “link” in the byline. You should be able to use the little email icon to email a blog entry to someone. Please let me know if you find any
I maintain the AYE web site as part of my responsibilities this year for the conference. I post the news, the new articles, and do the general updating. Monday, I posted one of Don Gray‘s articles, Shifting the Burden – Whose Monkey Is It? Except, Don and I had both made a mistake. Don
It’s been a tough week, and it’s only Wednesday morning. We’ve had a bunch of family illnesses — nothing deadly, but difficult to diagnose with long term effects. A very old friend of the family died. And because it’s June, the kids have a gazillion things with school and sports. I’m not quite back
If you’re managing a project longer than a few weeks, you may realize that the project’s progress is not quite where you think it should be. It can seem impossible to change course. But choosing to continue what you’re doing is a choice. So you can choose to do something different. I started thinking
I’ve been thinking a lot about impossible schedules. I’m talking about the project schedules that no matter how you organize the project, it’s not possible for this group of people to cram that set of features into this much time. At least, the developers don’t think so. If people are up against impossible schedules,
I’m in Israel this week, continuing an assessment I started last week. For those of you in the US, sit down. The people who have offices on an outside wall have windows that open. Yup, they do. The A/C and the heat know to shut off when the window is open. (I think they do,