In the last couple of years, I’ve worked with some project managers who thought the reason they made schedules was to know when the milestones would be met. They thought if they knew when “design complete” or “feature freeze” or “code complete” occurred, they could track the schedule. I’ve never been comfortable with that, […]
Oh dear. I was not sufficiently articulate in my last post. Both Frank and David in their comments asked about capacity, the output of the organization over time. That will teach me to post when I’m tired. (Maybe.) Let me try this again. In each of these projects, senior management wanted more features than
A client was optimizing for what they thought was the bottleneck in their software development: the testers. In the assessment, I gathered some quantitative data about how long the testers took to test and how long it took for the other groups to perform their work. (They used a phased lifecycle.) The testers were
David Anderson has an intriguing post, Lawyers, Unit Tests and Performance Reviews. David says “Individual team members can be set specific goals and behavior objectives…” and gives examples. I prefer that team members set their own goals with input from their managers. But the key here is that a technical person should be looking to
I have a column this week on Stickyminds, Multiprojecting: The Illusion of Progress. Thank you Frank Patrick, for naming this kind of multi-tasking (and for reviewing the work-in-progress). Feel free to comment on Stickyminds, unless you want to comment here.
About 15 months ago, Denise Robitaille and I met for lunch. Denise was explaining how she helped her clients implement a reasonable corrective action program. I explained how I’d helped some of my clients figure out what was really wrong when they had problems. We were struck by the similarities of our approaches. So,
Program management is the art of managing an effort of multiple projects with multiple deliverables. If you google “Program Management,” you’ll see a bunch of interesting posts, including Chris Pratley’s Program Management. To me, Chris is describing project management, albeit of a large project. When Chris talks about his “program” management, he’s discussing the coordination
Want to make sure you complete your project as early as possible? Define release criteria. Release criteria are the few critically important objective criteria that define what “done” means for your project. Sometimes, it’s a combination of date, defects, and feature completion. Sometimes it’s just the date. The formula for defining release criteria is: Define
In response to my most recent Pragmatic Manager (about shortening project startup times), a colleague wrote: “I am working on a lifecycle definition team in my department and finally convinced the team that Agile Development was a Methodology using an Iterative Model lifecycle.” My colleague has neatly described the methdology (the practices) and the
I’ve been thinking about Martha Stewart and her felony conviction this past weekend. I use this quote in the hiring book: “Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don?t have the first, the other two will kill you.” — Warren