At a recent client, a senior leader, Tim, said, “We realize we can’t do everything, but we don’t know how to get a handle on what we need to do.” We talked about what they measured and how long it took them to make decisions. (See Why Minimize Management Decision Time.) Tim explained that they […]
Alex Kourvo, of Writing Slices, just reviewed Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer. (That’s a link to her review.) She recommends it with four stars! Woo! Here are two excerpts I particularly enjoyed: “Rothman takes these brand-new writers by the hand with a guide full of wisdom, empathy, and truth.” “… is a wonderful, gentle guide”
I wrote about general meeting problems in Recognize the Problems That Prevent Effective Meetings (Collocated, Remote, Hybrid). But “hybrid” teams have much worse meeting problems. During the pandemic, most of us understood how to create nebula team meetings that worked. (Dispersed teams are nebula teams. See How To Understand Your Team Type: Collocated, Satellite, Cluster, Nebula for
Meetings. We all have them. Most of us hate them. When I ask why, here are some of the responses I hear: They take too much time away from our “real work.” It’s too hard to find time to meet. Our calendars are too full. We can’t find a place to meet. If we’re back
I thought watermelon status was something “everyone” knew about. But it’s not! Read No More Watermelon Status Reports: How to Use Stories to Explain Project State. That’s a persona-based approach to help other people understand the project’s reality. You also might like Velocity is Not Acceleration to see charts and data I use and recommend.
Twenty years ago today, I wrote my first blog post. I was nominally on vacation in Lake Tahoe, where my family was skiing. Since I’d stopped skiing by then, I used my vacations to write and read. And Esther Derby and I were writing some version of Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. We
If you, as I, write frequently, you might wonder where is the “best” place to publish your writing. You might think social media, especially Medium or LinkedIn, is the “best” in terms of eyeballs. (That’s people to the rest of us.) That’s possible the day, or maybe the week, you publish the piece. That’s because
About 20 years ago, I taught a project management workshop to IT people. Their products and services did not ship outside the building—their products and services enabled the organization to make money. During that workshop, the participants all had the same question, “How do we engage our stakeholders?” For years, I explained that the more
I’m reviewing experience report proposals for the XP 2023 conference. While I see potential in many of these proposals, I don’t see enough proposals that make me say, “Yes! I want to read this report! And see the speaker!” (Yes, I react in exclamation marks when I read a terrific proposal.) Experience reports allow us
Several people on social media have denigrated the terms “project manager” and “program manager.” These people claim there is no need for either role in an effective team, especially an agile team because the team can manage its own deliverables. While some agile teams can manage their own deliverables, that’s not the only role for