MPD

MPD

Multitasking is Conflict Avoidance

  There’s a great quote over at The pernicious thinking behind multi-tasking. Note the admission that required multi-tasking is an implicit means to avoid conflicts around setting priorities. I’ve been doing a bunch of multitasking talks this year (and suggesting ways for people to say no), and have written about it in Successful Project Management. […]

MPD, writing

Writing Status Report

I’m in what I hope is final editing for Successful Project Management. (I”m still doing gross editing, final copyediting is one more stage. But I’m not supposed to change ideas in that stage 🙂 If you want to know how to write a book, read PragDave’s series of So You Want to Write a Book.

measurement, MPD

There is No Such Thing as Percent Complete

  Jason Yip’s Hail Mary software development talks about what happens when you defer all the finishing to the end of the project. In the dashboard chapter of the book, I have a sidebar called “How Can We Have No Completed Work?” which talks about exactly the same thing. The more serial your lifecycle, or

MPD, personal

A Little Marital Humor

We’re on our way home from a ski vacation. Mark’s the driver; I’m the navigator. This morning (in the dark at 5:30am), Mark said, “I don’t need a GPS. I already have a voice to direct me.” I, of course, cracked up. Labels: humor, personal

management, MPD

It’s Too Hard to Bring New People Into the Organization

A number of my clients and colleagues are struggling with the problem of bringing people into their organizations. In Hiring the Best …, I recommend the buddy system for bringing people on. I wrote a little article, How2 Create a Buddy (Informal Mentoring) Program. But maybe you didn’t know that, or can’t figure out how

MPD

Estimating Tasks: How Much Time is in Your Day?

  I plan on about 6 hours of work in a regular day. That’s project work, not answering the phone, email, making arrangements for workshops or consulting or speaking, or invoicing, or any of the other things I do. Nope, that’s just project work. The other half of that question is how many regular days

MPD

Can You See Your Project's Dashboard?

  In the PM (it’s actually called “software methodology, but I assign a project, so students can experiment with methodologies) class I teach at TGI, I ask the students to create (and then use) a project dashboard, so they have a quantitative way to see their progress (or lack thereof). The students presented their dashboards

MPD, schedule

Scheduling the Project is a Team Activity

  Glen Alleman in What’s Wrong With This Picture says this: dentifying, sequencing, and assigning durations to tasks is NOT the role of the Project Scheduler, it is the role of the project team, along with the Project Scheduler. The Work Package Manager, the Customer, the entire team that is accountable for delivering the business

MPD

Automated Testing Helps Scrum Succeed

  Guy in his We love Scrum at GigaSpaces, says something critical: […]we’ve been working in the past couple of months on upgrading our automated testing framework. I’ve been assigning five of my top engineers and architects on a project with the objective to provide the development team fast feedback and monitors on quality. Now

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