I’ve been meaning to write a series of posts on schedule games, and a story I heard over the weekend has jolted me into writing about schedule chicken. I’m most familiar with schedule chicken that happens in meetings. Usually in a project status meeting, with the project manager and the project team, especially where
Two different colleagues wrote me with similar conundrums. Their managers wants a “technical” project manager. One colleague was a hardware person, the other was a tester. They have both been managing software projects for several years. No one has told them they were ineffective. (I’ve discussed this issue before: The Difference Between Project Managers and
Clarke Ching’s post, Functional Blindess, reminded me to post the ways I know about how to see the current state in a project or in an organization. For projects: Ask to see a demo. Can you see anything at all? If you can’t see the results of prototype tests, unit tests, some kind of
Roy Osherove taped my talk, “Nine Steps to Becoming More Agile” at the Israel Agile group meeting a couple of weeks ago. I was pleasantly surprised by how good the quality of the recording is. The recording isn’t perfect, because I walk back and forth across the room when I speak. I didn’t remember
I returned from my wonderful around-the-world trip last Friday afternoon. I didn’t try to work until Monday, but I realized today that I was still Asleep at the Wheel. I attempted to use a new-to-me configuration management system (Subversion). In my befuddled state, I managed to use some CVS commands instead of the Subversion commands.
I was reading You Are Possibly Very Annoying and realized I hadn’t posted Esther‘s and my six steps to effective feedback. (This is in the management book, starting publisher editing.) Here they are: Make sure you’re giving feedback about the work or the working relationships. Especially avoid clothes and other personal appearance issues (unless
In one of my classes earlier this week, one project manager explained that he spent an entire day each week working the Gantt chart in a scheduling tool. He has a project of roughly 20 developers, a few testers, and a few other people (I’ve forgotten the details). I asked if he had one-on-ones
I’m teaching project management (and some hiring) workshops in Israel. I’ve caught up with timezones, so I may even be able to post this week. I attempted to explain why pair programming works to some skeptical project managers last week. I explained that in the best environments, a person can work 6 hours a
I’m in lovely Perth, Australia this weekend, staying with some friends of mine. The husband was explaining how he makes sure his department buys coffee, tea, milk, sugar for everyone in the department. “It costs us about $2000 to supply the department for a year. In return, people congregate around the coffee, discussing work.
Workforce Management has tons of articles full of content. So I gotta wonder why they posted Forced Ranking Could Improve Business Performance. In the article, it says, “Forced ranking, the study finds, is more successful in the first several years of implementation.” Well, duh. If you force rank — even once — the people