I was working on a newsletter article about how to see your project’s progress, and got stuck. It’s easier to see project progress on a project with a tangible deliverable; it’s much harder for software or a service project. So, I took a break and read Esther Derby’s blog entry, Start Seeing Software from […]
Sometimes, it’s not clear that you should fund or staff a project. If you’re not sure how to discriminate between alternative projects, here are four questions to ask: What’s the strategic reason behind this project? (Does the strategic reason behind the project change the importance of the project?) How does this project fit into
I’m facilitating a roundtable, Test Management 101, on Stickyminds, and someone just posted a question about how to measure testers to show return on investment: measuring the number of defects they find. Ouch. When you measure developers on the number of lines of code, or testers on the number of defects, or carpenters on
Fred Brooks, in his classic, “The Mythical Man-Month,” talks about a chief programmer team (chief programmer, and programmers of lesser hierarchy until you get to the peon). The chief programmer team works when one person can keep all the details about the product in their head. If you use several hierarchical teams of chief
Sometimes on a project, we focus on an intermediate milestone in the project, such as Beta, or first performance test, or early ship. The project team works like dogs to make that intermediate milestone. Then, there’s still the rest of the project. Uh oh. Now you’re starting to cross the desert. (Thanks to Jack
If you’re a project manager, a functional manager, a technical lead, or someone who wants to improve their work, start a journal or a log. When I was an engineer, I kept an engineering notebook. I discovered a bunch of ways I created the same defects. (Yes, developers create defects as they create products,
I use the CMM in my work. The CMM/CMMI is a wonderful collection of key process areas. Every product development environment can use many of the key process areas to improve their work. The keyword in that sentence is *many*, not all. When companies aim for a particular level of the CMM/CMMI, they do
I talked to a project manager recently who was so busy fussing with the schedule (WBS) that he didn’t have time to make decisions on the project. He was a project administrator, not a project manager. If you’re working on a difficult and complex project, spend time on the schedule. You need to review
Have one or two open reqs? Want to make the most of them? Follow these steps: Define the job. Don’t create a laundry list of tools and technology. Create a set of requirements for the position: Who will the person interact with, and how What the person needs to know about the product domain
How much time should your project spend on development vs. time on quality? I’ve received a bunch of email over the past year asking me how much time a project should allocate to development and how much to quality. To me, that’s a funny question, because I think of quality as integrated with development. So,