Last night, the New England Society of Applied Spectroscopy had an evening of remembrances for Raúl Curbelo. Raúl was a pioneer in the development of spectroscopic instrumentation. I worked for Raúl at Digilab from 1978-1982. I spoke last night. Here is an excerpt of my comments: I can’t speak to the breakthroughs Raúl developed in […]
The good news is that agile has name recognition. The bad news is that a number of organizations are trying to start agile in a big-bang way, especially on programs. Program management is hard enough without throwing a new approach to projects into the mix. Since so many of you are emailing me about this,
Jonathan Rasmussen wrote a lovely review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. The part I like the best is: If you are looking for advice around what to measure when tracking your projects, how to come up with an actionable mission statement, or just how to effectively communicate the state of your portfolio ask Santa for
My Gantthead.com column has been up for a couple of weeks, but I was too busy traveling to notice :-(. The Silent Project Killer column is up. Enjoy!
I knew I was going to like The Agile Samurai from the first page: Agile is a way of developing software that reminds us that although computers run the code, it’s people who create and maintain it. Jonathan Rasmussen, the Other JR, has written a great, short, to-the-point book about how to move a project
On the bike at the gym this morning, I thought about increasing my level. When I exercise, more friction is good. But when you develop or use products, more friction is bad. Brian Marick talks about this when he speaks and writes about “ease” for development teams. If you’ve encountered a web page that made
Inez has a great review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. What resonated with me was: this book gives a more complete view of what is at stake when dealing with project portfolio management and will really help organisations to move forward faster with implementing and improving this key business issue of the 21st century, the
My column on Stickyminds is up: Measure Throughput, Not Utilization. Enjoy!
I’m at the Much Ado About Agile conference this week, in beautiful Vancouver. During lunch one day, one of the conference participants started talking about premature optimization of code. Well, I know a few things about that. When I started to work professionally as a developer, I wrote in assembly language. We had 256 bytes
I’ve been meeting people who call their teams distributed. But their teams are dispersed. That is, some team members are in one place, and some team members are in another. In the worst cases, there are separate people all over the world. For example, if you have cross-functional teams in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and