It’s been a tough week, and it’s only Wednesday morning. We’ve had a bunch of family illnesses — nothing deadly, but difficult to diagnose with long term effects. A very old friend of the family died. And because it’s June, the kids have a gazillion things with school and sports. I’m not quite back […]
If you’re managing a project longer than a few weeks, you may realize that the project’s progress is not quite where you think it should be. It can seem impossible to change course. But choosing to continue what you’re doing is a choice. So you can choose to do something different. I started thinking
I’ve been thinking a lot about impossible schedules. I’m talking about the project schedules that no matter how you organize the project, it’s not possible for this group of people to cram that set of features into this much time. At least, the developers don’t think so. If people are up against impossible schedules,
I’m in Israel this week, continuing an assessment I started last week. For those of you in the US, sit down. The people who have offices on an outside wall have windows that open. Yup, they do. The A/C and the heat know to shut off when the window is open. (I think they do,
I’ve been thinking about project retrospectives. Too few project teams participate in end-of-the-project retrospectives, and to few managers arrange for them. My clients seem concerned by the price of an outside facilitator and the cost in time to the next project. To address the facilitator cost, I’ve suggested that any facilitator not on the
Frank sent me the music baton. I don’t do chain letters, but I thought this was cute. Sorry, Frank, I’m still going to relate it to work.The official stuff: Total volume of music on my computer: 1128 songs (or 3.2 days, 5.23 GB) The last CD I bought: I can’t remember if it was Saturday
Well, all the comments on my No More Bugs post got me thinking. To answer a few comments here and elsewhere, I’m not trying to blame developers for being human and making mistakes. When I was a developer, most of my mistakes involved code. As a manager, most of my mistakes were in my dealings
Esther just called me from the Orlando airport to tell me she heard a fascinating rumor: Supposedly, she and I aren’t talking! After I was done laughing out loud, we examined this a little. We’ve facilitated sessions together at previous year’s STAR conferences, but I’ve been unable to attend last fall’s STAR and this spring’s
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,