About a month ago, I spoke with a project manager who’d inherited a project in chaos. No one was making progress. He was stumped–he’d never worked on a project where the developers couldn’t do anything, the testers couldn’t do anything, and time was just slipping away. I suggested he try baby steps. What’s the first
Dave posted his review of Manage it! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. A quote: Here’s what I like best about the book: it’s not theological. By this I mean Rothman doesn’t advocate one “true” way of running projects. She is very careful to be continually cognizant of context when she talks about different
Clarke Ching interviewed me by email. Here’s the link to the first question: Q1. There are a total of 7 questions.
It’s winter here in Massachusetts, and we’ve had lots of snow, ice, rain, snow, ice, snow, ice, rain. All that freezing and melting plays havoc with the roads. We have lots of potholes, and the local and state governments are busy doing emergency repairs all over the place. (For those of you who don’t know
Here’s a common scenario I was discussing with a colleague last night: They’re at the end of a project. They used some combination of a serial lifecycle, becoming more incremental as they proceed through the project. But they still have a ton of open defects, and a few not-quite-finished features. My colleague was complaining about
In one of the comments, for When is a Scrum Master (or a PM) Not?, Craig Brown said Process, process, process. What about people? At the end of the day the process is just one of several enabers (alongside culture, technology and tools, etc.) Won’t an experienced and talented team just deliver regardless of the
Both David Maister, in Compensation Systems, and George Dinwiddie, in Agile Compensation, have useful comments about compensation systems. There’s something implicit in both pieces, that the criteria to move from position to position (as well as from one salary to another) have to be explicit. For years, I called this expertise criteria. You develop expertise
Bob Sutton has an intriguing post, A Surprising Study of Infant Mortality Rates: Evidence-Based Management Meets Evidence Medicine. One of the surprising conclusions: One kind of collaboration was linked to higher mortality rates. When front-line employees became more involved in unit governance — doing things like being involved in decisions about who was hired and
Dave Liebreich sent me this email: I’m working with the new hire in our group, bringing him up to speed on our stuff. He noticed that I brought in my copy of “Manage It!”, and asked if it was to help me manage him. [pause for laughter] Never work for someone who refers to you