Many months ago, Rebecca asked an interesting question about technical debt in projects. She asked, How to start when there’s a really big mess? In that case, small, just being a professional clean-up acts may not even make a dent. Of course, as with any good question, the answer is, “it depends.” And the biggest […]
I’ve been having some strange email conversations with two testers, one business analyst, and a project manager. Yes, a total of four new people. They have each found jobs on projects. And, they are in over their heads. Each of them wrote to me, hoping I would help. The testers wanted to know how to
I wrote a column for Gantthead, How to Use Iteration Zero (or Not). I’m not a big fan of iteration zero, except for learning. In which case, it’s a great idea. Go take a look and see what you think. Please leave comments over there.
I delivered a keynote last week at StarWest, Becoming a Kick-A** Test Manager.” If you want to watch me in action, you can register for the virtual conference, and see a number of the keynotes and talks. I had an interview, too. I try to build interaction into all my talks, including my keynotes. I
I have another management myth posted on Stickyminds. This one is about training. “Management Myth #9: We Have No Time for Training” is up on the site. Now, I have to admit, that when I was a new manager, I fell for this myth. Oh, I knew enough to make sure that we had lunch-and-learns.
I’m finally writing a Pragmatic Manager email to my faithful readers. That’s when I noticed I had forgotten to post my July email newsletter. Yikes! So, here is What Does Your Organization Reward? I am committed to emailing another email newsletter this week. Are you on my newsletter list? Sign up on my site or
When I was in Brazil teaching the project portfolio workshop, one of the participants explained that his organization sometimes did a form of gold/silver/bronze comparison among the projects. Here’s how it works. Everyone wrote their project names on stickies. The first cut is everyone self-assigns their projects to Gold, Silver, Bronze categories. That’s right, everyone
My most recent management myth is up on Techwell, Management Myth #8: I Can Still Do Significant Technical Work. I see managers catch themselves in this one all the time. Maybe you do too. Maybe you disagree with me. Comment over there, please. BTW, This article is a partial attempt to answer the question, “How
I facilitated a project management clinic last week at PSL. One of the questions was this: We have a product owner who persists in changing the contents of the sprint during the sprint. This is difficult for us. It costs us to change the content. Okay, this is a huge pain in the tush. It’s
In my talk, How Much Will this Project Cost? at Agile 2012 last week, I got to say, “Short is beautiful.” For those of you who have never seen me, I’m five feet tall. The question was something like this: For programs, don’t you want longer iterations, so people don’t have the overhead of planning,