The title of this blog is “Managing Product Development.” That means that I manage my own product development, products and projects, as well as provide advice for other people. I have many opportunities to do that. My most recent opportunity arose this past year when I self-published Hiring Geeks That Fit, electronically and in print. […]
Continued from Part 1… I Wrote a Better Book How do I make a better book? I removed all the passive voice. I updated the book with the new sourcing material about Twitter and LinkedIn—neither of which existed when I first wrote the book. I updated the templates, because I’ve learned over the years. I
Glen Alleman seems to have nailed it, with Alert – Was Poor PM the Root Cause of ACA Difficulties? Among the many problems: No overall program manager No way for stakeholders to know what Done looks like (no release criteria) No replanning I’m a huge fan of rolling wave planning. (Read Starting with Rolling Wave
I have posted several slideshares for your reading pleasure. You won’t get the pleasure of my humor, eye rolling and jokes. Nope, for that you would have had to hear me speak. In September, I spoke at AgileSoCal, and had an interactive talk, Agile Teams and Collaboration: What’s New About Agile? I have a small
I’ve been thinking about estimation these days. After the healthcare.gov site fiasco, and all the schedule games–many of which are estimation problems, I thought about why we estimate. The larger the effort, the more we need to estimate. And, the more your estimate will be wrong. The more we estimate, the more we have schedule
Did you see Dwayne Phillips’ post today, Adding People to a Late Project? Dwayne says: Adding people to a late project only makes it later. We have known this for decades. Especially in the article he refers to, it seems as if there might be no end to the number of people added. Did anyone
The nice folks at ScheduleMailer interviewed me about how I accomplish what I do. They consider me a time management expert. That’s what project portfolio management will do for you. I thought it was funny that one of the questions was about work/life balance. I wanted to say, “Honey, it’s all life.” I managed to
I read Sayonara Sony: How Industrial, MBA-Style Leadership Killed a Once Great Company, and was struck by how the company appeared to make decisions—what will make us the most money now? If you make your project portfolio decisions based on money, estimated cost, you too will have Sony’s problems. This is why cost is the
I just read Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work. For me, it was a mixed read. Yes, you can make a totally distributed team work. What you need to do: Make all of the work visible Keep everyone focused on one project at a time Keep all of the
I was in the midst of an assessment when the CIO came to me, and shut the door. “I have a serious question for you.” I nodded for him to continue. I put aside my papers to show him I was providing him my undivided attention. “I’m thinking of offshoring all the testers. What do