While teaching a management class recently, one participant came up to me at a break, and said, “Why are you teaching us project management with this portfolio stuff? This is supposed to be a management workshop.” Portfolio management, determining which projects to fund and when, is management work. The best managers actively manage the […]
I’ve taught several workshops where people wanted to learn how to start adopting some agile approaches. They knew about timeboxing, but didn’t quite see how to make it work. The part they were missing was having working valuable product at the end of each timebox. I explain that to the participants, and they nod sagely.
I taught a workshop about transitioning to Agile earlier this week. One of the things that’s difficult for many project managers to recognize is that milestones must be deliverables–otherwise, it’s too hard to know when something is done. One of the participants had a slightly puzzled look on his face when I said that,
If you haven’t read Duane Nathaniel’s thoughtful comment on What Happens When You Can’t Finish What You Wanted in an Iteration?, do so now. Duane makes some great points. RUP has iterations; they’re not timeboxed–they’re deliverable-based. (Take a look at the link that Duane points to.) In the RUP, an iteration results in a deliverable.
I’ve encountered a number of projects where people didn’t know the context of their work. As developers, they were working on the thing they had to develop or fix today. They might remember what they had done yesterday, but there was no sense that they knew what they needed to do tomorrow, or that they
A reader was reading Characteristics of Great Project Managers and asked, “Do you feel that to be a great Project Manager one need not know completely about the technology involved?” No. Project managers need to understand enough about the technology so that they can make tradeoff decisions (or help product owners make tradeoff decisions) about
When I teach project management, I ask the participants to create a project charter (See my templates page for one I use to start). I recently encountered a battered project manager who does not have a project charter for a project with 6 or 7 sub-projects. This PM is smart, but has never managed a
At the most recent Boston SPIN meeting, I caught up with a fellow I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. He thanked me for the advice I’d given him on a tough project the last time I’d seen him. I had no idea what he was saying, so I asked him what the
I was reading Michael Specht’s links of Mar 24, 2006 and found this gem: One Hundred Rules for NASA Project Managers.
Matisse has an interesting post, Software is like Building Construction. He talks about iterative design and the interdependencies of people with deliverables as being common to construction and software. In my opinion, he’s not all wrong, but he’s not all right. I agree that there are plenty of design-build firms who wait until the