Harvard’s alumni network is legendary. I have colleagues over 50 who’ve never looked for a job outside their Harvard network. But how many of us managed to attend or graduate from Harvard? Not that many, I suspect. On the other hand, many of us have worked for great companies—or at least worked with great people. […]
If you’ve ever planned a project, you know how hard the initial planning can be. There’s a reason we call the start of the project the “fuzzy front end.” Some project managers give up on the planning altogether and dive into details hoping that a plan will evolve. Looking Ahead It’s possible to generate a
Edna sprinted down the hall to her next meeting. “Edna, wait up,” her boss yelled. “What do you want, Wayne. I’m in a rush to get to this meeting,” she said. “I want you to run another project for me. It’s about …” Edna interrupted, “Wayne. Stop right there. We had this discussion last month
Tristan, the senior manager in charge of all projects, strides into Ilene’s office and plunks himself down in her visitor’s chair. “Ilene, you are the project manager in charge of the project to save the company, right?” Ilene nods. “I really need you to fit this other feature into this release,” Tristran says. “We’re toast
Normally, I’m huge fan of continuous integration. Continuous integration is when everyone integrates his or her code every day, preferably as each little tiny piece is built and tested (or in the case of test-driven development, tested and built). The developer checks his or her code in, does a local build, checks the build, and
Summary: Staged integration versus continuous integration–which does your team prefer? Can’t decide if one is better than the other? In this week’s column, Johanna Rothman explains that you can create the perfect blend of the two. Developers and testers benefit from frequent builds, but be careful with how much you build. Build too much or too
I recently spoke with a recruiter who told me, “I just can’t seem to find agile candidates. No one has “stand-up meetings’ listed on his resume.” When you’re reviewing resumes, it would be nice to find some keywords so you could see if the candidate has had agile experience–but it’s unlikely. However, implementing a few
Technical debt is the unfinished work the product development team accumulated from previous releases. This debt includes: design debt, where the design is insufficiently robust in some areas; development debt, where pieces of the code are missing; and testing debt, where tests were not developed or run against the code. Technical debt is common, but
When it comes to projects, there are as many questions to answer as there are project teams, but “Where are we?” is by far the most popular. The key to understanding a project is to make regular measurements—both quantitative and qualitative—and display the measurements publicly. When project managers display these measurements as part of the
Senior managers — the people who make strategic product decisions — need to know when they can expect those products to release. The organization of current product releases against a timeline is a project portfolio. And, planning the project portfolio in an agile environment is different — but not harder — than planning the project