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’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
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 read Metrics with Impact by Michiel van Genuchten and Les Hatton in the July/August IEEE Software, pp 99-101 last week. They discuss a metric: Compound Annual Growth, CAGR for software. CAGR is interesting to me, because I’ve actually measured it before. Here are some graphs (no numeric data) to describe what happens in different
I had a great time recording an interview last week with Carolyn Seaman for OnTechnicalDebt.com. The interview is over at Pragmatic Ways for Your IT Team to Deal with Technical Debt. Alexandra queued us up. Carolyn and I had a great time discussing technical debt. I even managed to mention Chris Sterling’s book Managing Software
Are you interested in how to manage agile projects? Thinking of transitioning to agile? Available on March 7, 2013? I am leading an experiential one-day tutorial in conjunction with AgileIndy to introduce the ideas of agile project management to people who are interested in agile project management in Indianapolis on March 7, 2013. The tutorial
I have an article about test dashboards up on TechTarget. It’s called How to measure test progress: Every picture tells a story. The article has pictures. If you want more pictures, see Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Enjoy!