If you’ve never been a victim of Medieval software project management, wow, I’m impressed. You don’t have to read the rest of this post. But if you’ve ever tried to break free of a legacy product/project, and haven’t been able to, you are not alone. The problem is we can’t create a knowledge management system […]
In Knowledge Management Needs to be Agile, Too, I said If you put people in competition with each other *in any way*, they will have dis-incentives to share their knowledge. John, in his comment on that post, said it seemed intuitive, but was having trouble articulating why. I’m here to help 🙂 Some of my
I’ve posted my “Seeing Your Work” podcast. It’s available on libsyn and through iTunes. If you’d like me to interview you or you interview me, lemme know.
Jim, in his comment on Intuition is Not Enough for Knowing About the Project Portfolio, said: I am having trouble with the definition of the word “value” in this context. Do you mean showing progress, as in earned value, or value to the customer, such as in ROI or payback period? Value has become a
I’ve been using BackUpWordPress to backup my blogs. I successfully upgraded Hiring Technical People to a newer version of WP and of BackUpWordPress. I upgraded this blog, Managing Product Development, to the newer version of WP, but now my newer version of BackUpWordPress is not working. I’m pretty sure it’s all about file permissions. If
Via Jack Vinson, I found this gem: Stop doing half-actions. All of you who are separating your developers from your testers? You are doing half-actions. Separating the writers from the developers and testers? Half actions there, too. Even when you define architecture and implement across the architecture, instead of by feature, that’s a half-action. A
I’ve been reading Jeffrey Kaplan’s book, Strategic IT Portfolio Management, as part of my research for my project portfolio book. He says something astounding (I’m paraphrasing a sentence on p.73): Managers intuitively know when their projects are not delivering sufficient value. Wow, that has not been my experience at all. My experience is that managers
I ran into Dan North at the Agile conference today, and explained a little about the project portfolio book. I’m writing it because I have a number of clients who are having trouble breaking the multitasking habit (working on more than one project at one time.) Dan said, “Oh, you want them to commit to
I’ve been steadily writing the project portfolio management book this summer, and was describing what I do to Steve Freeman someone today. (I’m at the Agile 2008 conference.) I explained that I had a list of things I thought should be in a chapter, but it wasn’t a real outline the way other people outline.
One of the big problems in organizations is how to fund projects. ROI does not work. I learned how to lie with ROI back in 1988—I can make the numbers be anything you want. But if you don’t have ROI, how do you know what projects to fund? One set of projects is the set