I met a manager recently who relayed his technique for making sure his testers stayed focused on their jobs. “Our defect-tracking system logs people off after 30 minutes of idle time. If they’re logged off, I know they’re not working.” This was a new one for me. I’ve heard of counting lines of code. […]
I taught a management tutorial at the Better Software conference this week. One of the points I discussed (and asked participants to discuss) was delegation. The managers in my tutorial said they ran into these problems when trying to delegate: Being too concerned with how the delegatee did the work, not the results. Wanting people
I received my copies of Behind Closed Doors, and here at the Better Software conference, the bookstore has books. I’m still very excited.
I gave a talk entitled “Predicting Project Completion” at the Central Mass chapter of the PMI last night. I had some suggestions about techniques to generate and discuss schedule estimates. Then, to practice a little, I asked the audience to become participants and practice a simulation. The simulation is to first estimate how long
If you’ve wanted to catch some of my presentations but were unable to make it to a conference or one of my speaking engagements, you have three opportunities this fall that don’t require you to leave your desk. I’ll be doing a series of webinars for Orasi, about the impact of people and relationships
I’ve been watching, reading, and listening to the Katrina coverage over the past week. And the one thing that stands out for me is my perception that there was a lack of disaster planning. I’m not going to play the blame game–there’s plenty to go around. But here are the questions I would have
Behind Closed Doors is available for preorder. The book is at the printer, and we expect hardcopies to start shipping late September. In the meantime, if you can’t wait (and I hope you can’t :-), you can buy the combo-pack of the PDF (now) and the book (later in September).
If you haven’t read the classic Places to Intervene in a System, take a little time and do so. My colleague Don Gray has written an afterword that relates the article to software product development. I’m realizing that the way I do assessments uses these interventions. I have to think more about how to write
My ISP is not allowing emails to my domain name address (again!), so I will be changing ISPs this week. And, I’m chauffering Daughter#1 to colleges, so don’t expect anything from me this week.
If you’d like to hear some of what’s in Behind Closed Doors, Andy has recorded an mp3 of one of our sidebars, “The Fable of the Rising Young Manager.” BTW, I thought it was thrilling the first time I saw my name in print as an author. Now that I hear our words, it’s just