There’s all kinds of hype every single day about AI taking the place of programmers. That reasoning infers that typing is the hard part of product development. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here are the hard parts of product development: Understanding what the customers want. Often, the customers don’t know until they see […]
I recently learned that the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada has closed all of its retail stores. This is a big deal, because they’d been in business since 1670. But it’s an even bigger deal for risk management. That’s because the Company pioneered the use of the “Hudson’s Bay Start.” That’s where they encouraged the
Up until now, when thinking about risks, I defaulted to the risks in the project pyramid. That’s because each project offers different value over the product’s lifetime. (See Product Roles, Part 4: Product Orientation and the Role of Projects for images of why we want ever-increasing product value, but why we might space the projects
I had the pleasure of speaking with two different colleagues today, both with the same dilemma. They are near the end of their projects. They don’t quite have enough time for one round of final testing–but if they’re lucky and the stars align, and they don’t find too many problems, they can still (maybe)
Scott points out Software Product Delivery – 20 Rules? that you should do the riskiest part of the project first. (He explains that you modify that given what’s most important.) I’d add a further refinement: that what’s most important better provide the most value. If it doesn’t, do the most valuable parts first. You
So after I posted the Probabilistic Scheduling post, I was working merrily away. I had made some small progress on the book, but was still finishing up other things. Finally, Wednesday I had cleared the entire day to work on the book. I was having trouble with one chapter, so I decided to make
It’s been quite the Monday so far. My office toilet started spewing water, a cabinet door fell off one of the cabinets in the kitchen, and I’m trying to back up and duplicate my hard disk because both latches on my Powerbook broke at the Agile conference and I need to send my computer
My friend and colleague, Stever Robbins, has started a blog, and one of his early posts is Are engineers living on another planet? Don’t they use their software? Unfortunately, not always. It takes self-discipline and the desire to look for problems to cause people to create systems that allow them to use their own
I changed ISPs last Friday. At some point Friday, my ISP bounced my email with a strange (to me) message. This is the same ISP that had problems just a few months ago, so I was done. I need email up virtually 100% of the time. And if I can’t receive email, I need
One of my students emailed me recently, asking about how to assess project complexity. He said, “I think it would be pretty neat and also quite useful if you could define a project as say a .60 Apollos or what have you… I don’t imagine it would be at all easy to come up