During an email conversation last week, I suggested that my client change his naming of “bug” to “defect.” He asked why. People don’t create bugs, but people create defects (or problems or faults). Bugs crawl in or fly in from the outside, when you’re not expecting them to. But we expect defects and problem in […]
I was sitting on the couch was organizing a database last weekend, with daughter #2 sitting next to me. I was creating a script to go through each record removing a field’s contents and adding new contents to another field. Not a difficult thing to do. I created a loop, and daughter #2 said,
Months ago, Debbie asked this question, “Do you have any comparative analysis on the disciplines (project management and program management) that you would like to share?” To me, program management is the ability to take a project or a series of projects and manage those (see Program Management: Multiple Projects With Multiple Deliverables) in the
I’ve learned about schedule games from lots of people and projects. Here is the list of acknowledgements, as I remember them. If I left anyone off, please let me know. We had a discussion of schedule games on the AYE wiki, which helped me remember just how many games there are. I’m pretty sure I
You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m not enamored of project scheduling tools. And since I most often do rolling wave planning, I don’t normally need a scheduling tool. But, here’s another true story. I was coaching a PM in an organization where the execs only understood the waterfall lifecycle. They thought iterating was a
One of my clients claimed he had ADHD. He had trouble keeping projects focused on one goal. I’ve known him for a while, and he didn’t have this problem when he was a project manager. Nope, he made sure that each project he managed had a goal, and beware any senior manager who wanted to
You and I know that the schedule is an estimate. The project schedule is your best guess about when the project team will reach which milestones, and when the project may complete. But a schedule is not a prediction; it is a guess. So when I meet senior managers who want a project team
You’re a project manager. Your project is proceeding fairly well. You’ve had a few bumps, but you’re making progress. You come into work one day, and there’s a message to meet with the Big Cheese. Big Cheese says, “Stop working on that project. Start on this one!” Not only does this happen once, it
Sometimes, I work with organizations where there’s an implicit agreement not to discuss the schedule. I’ve seen this schedule game in two flavors: the first is Dream Time, where the project team and management believe the schedule, especially if it’s in a scheduling tool with lots of graphs and different colored lines. The other is
A few years ago, I received a call to help out a project in trouble. Unsurprisingly, when I was reviewing what had been done and what still left to do, the PM explained there were many half-implemented features. (The team had not been implementing by feature, but instead by architecture. Each architecture group had