A few years ago, a senior manager called me. “We have a project in trouble. We started off hopeful, but now it looks impossible.” I asked a few questions, and discovered they had never done a project like this before. It was bigger, in a different language, on a new platform, with a shorter […]
I’ve been talking to a beleaguered colleague about his project schedule. “No matter what date I give them (senior management), they want an earlier date. I told them it doesn’t take nine women to make a baby in one month, I need some time for this project!” The Bring me a rock schedule game
I was a fortunate young developer. In my first three months at work, I ran into the 90% done schedule game. I did it to myself. I estimated a particular task was going to take 6 weeks. Of course, being an arrogant and naive developer, it never occurred to me to break the task
I’m thrilled to announce that you can see the announcement of Esther’s and my book, currently entitled Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management Revealed. Yes, this is the book we pair-wrote. We’re in the final stretch. First is working with Andy and Dave and whomever from Pragmatic Bookshelf to make sure we didn’t
I’ve been meaning to write a series of posts on schedule games, and a story I heard over the weekend has jolted me into writing about schedule chicken. I’m most familiar with schedule chicken that happens in meetings. Usually in a project status meeting, with the project manager and the project team, especially where
Two different colleagues wrote me with similar conundrums. Their managers wants a “technical” project manager. One colleague was a hardware person, the other was a tester. They have both been managing software projects for several years. No one has told them they were ineffective. (I’ve discussed this issue before: The Difference Between Project Managers and
Clarke Ching’s post, Functional Blindess, reminded me to post the ways I know about how to see the current state in a project or in an organization. For projects: Ask to see a demo. Can you see anything at all? If you can’t see the results of prototype tests, unit tests, some kind of
Roy Osherove taped my talk, “Nine Steps to Becoming More Agile” at the Israel Agile group meeting a couple of weeks ago. I was pleasantly surprised by how good the quality of the recording is. The recording isn’t perfect, because I walk back and forth across the room when I speak. I didn’t remember
I returned from my wonderful around-the-world trip last Friday afternoon. I didn’t try to work until Monday, but I realized today that I was still Asleep at the Wheel. I attempted to use a new-to-me configuration management system (Subversion). In my befuddled state, I managed to use some CVS commands instead of the Subversion commands.
I was reading You Are Possibly Very Annoying and realized I hadn’t posted Esther‘s and my six steps to effective feedback. (This is in the management book, starting publisher editing.) Here they are: Make sure you’re giving feedback about the work or the working relationships. Especially avoid clothes and other personal appearance issues (unless