Esther, in her Get out of your way! post describes a situation where by our behaviors, we cause the thing we don’t want to happen. It happened to me this week. I’ve been working on the PM book, and I’ve been struggling with the lifecycle chapter for a couple of months now. Probably longer, […]
A colleague asked how to deal with this situation. “It’s clear Brad is being a jerk. I’m working with him on how to be less of a jerk. But Susie asked me today when I’m going to do something about the problem–nothing she says seems to make a dent in his behavior. What can I
If you’re a regular reader of this blog (or the Hiring blog), you can see that I’m not shy or demure. I’m blunt and direct. And in most circumstances, I manage to straight-talk without hurting anyone, even myself. But that wasn’t the case earlier this week. I was writing the PM book, concentrating. The phone
I have an all-in-one machine, a fax/copier/scanner/printer, that I use for copying, scanning and primarily faxing. It’s fine fax machine. And it’s a great copier. But when I hook it up to my computer for scanning to a file, it falls apart. Half the time (or more), my computer can’t establish a USB connection
I’m trying to describe the costs of multitasking. Here’s what I’ve got so far: There are three parts to multitasking: Stopping the work you’re doing. The stopping cost is the time it takes to mark your place, save your work, etc. You haven’t stopped thinking about what you’re doing, but when you stop to
I’m finally back home after 4 weeks on the road. Yes, I was completely nuts to spend 4 weeks away. My office is a disaster, and so is my email. (My domain name is being spoofed, so I’m getting thousands of returned failed email messages a day. Pain in the tush to process.) So,
One of my clients said to me, “There’s no one who doesn’t need a boss.” He meant it as “Everyone needs someone to check with, to make sure they’re headed in the right direction.” I agree.
I’ve encountered a number of projects where people didn’t know the context of their work. As developers, they were working on the thing they had to develop or fix today. They might remember what they had done yesterday, but there was no sense that they knew what they needed to do tomorrow, or that they
I facilitated a management problem-solving session at the STARWest conference yesterday. When I was debriefing the activities, one participant said he’s met a bunch of testers and test managers who had a “siege” mentality. He was surprised by that. I’m still surprised when I meet people like that. I sometimes see developers who feel
I’m thrilled to be going back to the Softed folks (in Wellington, Auckland, and Sydney) who are doing a project management conference next March. I’m working out with them what topics I’ll be covering. I have a 3-hour workshop in the afternoon. It’s enough time to cover a couple of topics with interactions and