During the past few week, while editing Successful Project Management, I had an opportunity learned to discover other ways I weaken my writing. I already knew about “get” and “put” and “do”–any words you can command a computer–are weak verbs. It’s ok to use them to start writing, but my writing is stronger when […]
I’m in what I hope is final editing for Successful Project Management. (I”m still doing gross editing, final copyediting is one more stage. But I’m not supposed to change ideas in that stage 🙂 If you want to know how to write a book, read PragDave’s series of So You Want to Write a Book.
True confessions: I was hoping to finish the draft (of Successful Project Management) for technical review today. I didn’t. I knew on Tuesday and called Daniel to let him know where I was. This past week I focused on finishing chapters. I have about 16 chapters and one appendix. I don’t know if the book
I’m writing part of the PM book, and said this about the minimum requirements for a configuration management system (CMS): Modern CMSs can branch, label, automatically merge multiple authors’ changes, and allow for developers to work in their own private workspaces (sandboxes). If your CMS can’t do that, dump it and obtain a new
I’m busy writing the PM book, and saw these great posts. So instead of making myself crazy trying to write more good stuff for you, I decided you should read these. What is managing software development? is a great read. BTW, the working definition I have of project manager is: the person who knows
Esther, in her Get out of your way! post describes a situation where by our behaviors, we cause the thing we don’t want to happen. It happened to me this week. I’ve been working on the PM book, and I’ve been struggling with the lifecycle chapter for a couple of months now. Probably longer,
Keith Ray, Dale Emery, and I are writing books. Keith and Dale are tracking their writing with spreadsheets. Dale is posting his progress online. You can see his Oct 8 progress.I decided they were on to something, and start tracking my progress in a spreadsheet also. I have about 35,000 words written. I have about
I’m writing the project management book. I’m noting that sometimes PMs (and teams) perform activities that have no lasting useful effect on the project. One example is doing estimation with feedback. If you estimate but never check reality against those estimates, that’s an example of “mental masturbation: it feels good but there’s no lasting
I am an early reviewer on Esther Derby’s and Diana Larsen’s upcoming book about retrospectives (Pragmatic Bookshelf, sometime this year). Here’s a piece of my feedback that puzzled Esther: “Put those words on weight training!” Her response was “cute, but what do I do?” I laughed out loud on the phone with her. I was
You may have noticed a long time between posts here. I was traveling virtually all of March, and had a tough time with finishing all my client work and making time to blog. Once I was home, I had a tough time with jet lag. I believe I’m unlagged and ready. I have ton of