Last night at my SPIN talk someone came up to me at the end of the talk. I’d discussed earned value and inch-pebbles in my talk but hadn’t specifically discussed how to avoid the dreaded “percent complete” reporting problem to management. The percent complete problem occurs when you have to report progress to management as […]
The Boston area still isn’t over the Red Sox loss last week, and one good thing to arise from their loss is a discussion of management decisions. In A cautionary tale: management counts, Douglas Eisenhart says “If you think management doesn’t have an impact on a team’s performance, think again.” Eisenhart then discusses Grady
On the face of it, higher productivity looks like a Good Thing. More products for less time. Who wouldn’t want this? But I wonder about this search for higher productivity. What do managers really want? If you want to understand about productivity for software organizations, read Putnam and Myers’ new book, Five Core Metrics:
It’s fall conference season, and I’ve been quiet because of the travel and final preparations for sessions. One of my sessions at the AYE conference is called Predicting Project Completion. I decided it was time to explore how to predict the end of a project when I encountered two clients this year. One made
I’m at the 13ICSQ conference this week. One person (at least) was confused about agile processes: Conference attendee: “Agile processes are a license to hack!!!!!!!” JR: “No. Every agile team I’ve seen is highly disciplined. No hacking there. I’m sure there are people who say they’re performing agile development, and they’re just hacking, but truly
I met a test manager recently who was excited about starting a new position as a QA manager: “I really want to make a difference in the company, so I’m going to be the quality manager and set up all the processes for everyone to follow.” Uh oh. I asked if they were planning
If you haven’t read Joel Spolsky’s entry on office architecture stop and read that first. Finally, an office in which people can successfully work alone andwith other people — and who don’t have to worry about keeping their voices down. I’m amazed at the space per person (425 sq. ft if I understood). Most
I’m a big fan of managers admitting their mistakes. (It’s one of the lessons I learned early as a manager.) I take that seriously, seriously enough that when someone found a glaring error in my last SD column, Future Fixes, I asked the editor let me publish a correction and I sent in replacement text
Last week at the Software Development conference, I met a software director. His group, a total of about 30-40 people (I’ve forgotten the exact number) is responsible for all the software his company produces. He has two managers managing those folks. He’s busy, so although he requests that his managers have one-on-ones with their staff,
First read Esther’s entry about the Secrets of Motivation for some great pointers on not demotivating people. If you’re having a cynical day or need a chuckle go to Despair.com. At dinner last night, some friends were talking about motivational posters — and we all laughed. One colleague told me about these sarcastic motivational