by Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Software Devleopment Magazine, December 1999. I’ve had great managers, and I’ve had lousy managers. The great managers always seemed to be pushing forward, solving problems and thinking about better ways to do things. The lousy managers repeated their mistakes on project after project; they claimed to […]
Abstract You’ve written the job description. You know just what you want in this employee. You have one tiny problem—you just can’t find that person. Now what? Sometimes you can continue to wait for the right person to come along. Sometimes you choose to hire someone with inadequate skills. In either case, you don’t have
Last week, we talked about avoiding dead projects. Now it’s time to talk about the hardest project category: the political project. Killing political projects is difficult, because it’s not a rational problem. Rational discussions are useless and don’t work. You can bring out metrics or try to discuss project-related issues, but nothing will work because
by Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor, October 6, 1999. I visit many different organizations over the course of the year. As I begin working with a client, inevitably someone whispers to me, “Can you help kill my project?” I don’t normally kill projects, but some folks are so desperate to
© 1999 Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Crosstalk, October 1999. Organizations struggle [1] with their process improvement efforts for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most common struggle pattern is to take a long time developing a general understanding of their processes and then trying to define all possible alternatives in the
by Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor, July 7, 1999. “There is nothing permanent except change.” — Heracleitus As our industry has changed from mainframes to client-server to distributed systems and the Web, the tools we use to develop and test our software have changed. How do we keep our staff
The three-month project is over. The client is thrilled with your work. You go back to the office, create the invoice, drop it in the mail, and wait for the check to arrive. And wait, and wait, and wait. Finally, after two months, you call your client who promises to look into it. A week
© 1999 Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor, March 24, 1999. At a recent visit to an IT client, the new QA manager took me aside and said: “JR, here are the metrics I want to measure on a monthly basis. What do you think?” He had attempted to measure efficiency,
© 1999 Johanna Rothman and Brian Lawrence. Originally published in Software Testing and Quality Engineering, Mar./April 1999 Issue. A project manager strides purposefully into your office. “JB, this disk has the latest and greatest release of our software. Please test it.” You say “OK, OK. What does it do?” The manager stops in his tracks
© 1999 Johanna Rothman. Originally published in Cutter’s Business-IT Alignment E-Mail Advisor, Feb. 3, 1999. Many IT managers are juggling too many projects and not enough staff. How do you make sure everyone’s focused on the right project? First, decide what’s most important for the business right now. Just because something was important at one