Many project managers (and senior management) still have the mindset of “How much can we fit into this project?” instead of “How little can we do?” How-much thinking carries these assumptions (even if your managers don’t agree): People are a scarce resource, and that we should put all of them to use immediately, working […]
Hal recently said, “Listening is one of the foundational skills of project managers.” I agree, and would add writers, tech support reps, people managers to that list. What about developers and testers? I think they need to listen also. Anyone working in an agile project needs to listen (including customers or product managers). Is there
In a recent blog post and comment, Hal Macomber said, “Listening is one of the foundational skills of project managers. Without a high level of competence at listenting projects are doomed to drift. Given the general characterization by wives that husbands don’t listen, anytime we have project managers who are men we have a potential
In Sunday’s Boston Globe View from the Cube column, Lisa Liberty Becker claims “Telling the truth can be hazardous to your job”. She goes on to talk about her husband, a performance test engineer, whose manager buried his reports, because “they [the reports] reflect poorly on the job he’s done.” The result? Bad product performance,
Earlier this week, I was at SPC teaching about project requirements and project management. If you haven’t thought about lifecycles, consider the differences between these kinds of lifecycles: Linear: Waterfall and waterfall with feedback Iterative: Spiral, where the whole product is up for grabs each time Incremental: Where you add to the product in pieces
I was on the phone this morning with a senior manager. He was describing their current project: “Well, we’ve got 25 people: 12 developers, 6 testers, 2 writers, 4 support people, and 1 project manager.” I asked about the managers of the developers and testers. “Oh, the dev manager is running the project. We
Sometimes on a project, we focus on an intermediate milestone in the project, such as Beta, or first performance test, or early ship. The project team works like dogs to make that intermediate milestone. Then, there’s still the rest of the project. Uh oh. Now you’re starting to cross the desert. (Thanks to Jack
How much time should your project spend on development vs. time on quality? I’ve received a bunch of email over the past year asking me how much time a project should allocate to development and how much to quality. To me, that’s a funny question, because I think of quality as integrated with development. So,