Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Discovering and Maintaining Your Project’s Heartbeat, Part 1 Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Discovering and Maintaining Your Project’s Heartbeat Some projects zoom along, making progress regularly. Others feel as if they slog along, with barely any progress from week to week, or worse, month to month. Why? The zooming projects have
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: How Many Emergency Projects Do You Have? Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: How Many Emergency Projects Do You Have? A project manager at a client took me aside recently. “Johanna, how many emergency projects should I have?” I was a bit surprised and asked what he meant. “Well, my boss thinks
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Providing Effective Correcting and Reinforcing Feedback Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Providing Effective Correcting and Reinforcing Feedback So you can’t stand the way Bonzo checks in his broken code on Friday afternoons. Or, Cecile has such bad breath no one wants to work with her. Or, you’re not sure how to
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Using One-on-Ones to Build Trust Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Using One-on-Ones to Build Trust A colleague of mine just arrived at a new company as a manager. He’s inherited a group where management was (and still is) a dirty word. Due to some of the previous managers’ actions, the technical
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Becoming Comfortable with One-on-Ones Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Becoming Comfortable with One-on-Ones Last month’s feature article was about building trust with one-on-one meetings. In response, a reader mailed me this question: “How long should it take to become comfortable with one-on-ones?” Ok. Here’s the standard answer: It depends. It depends
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Starting on Strategic Planning Announcements =-=-=-=-= Feature Article: Starting on Strategic Planning Since Esther and I published Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (see below for the official announcement), I’ve received several emails asking how to do strategic planning for small groups. Here’s an outline of a technique I’ve
Feature Article: Decreasing Project Completion Time, Part 2 Last month, I discussed techniques to decrease project startup time. Now it’s time to look at practices that can decrease project completion time once you’ve started the project. Ask the developers to unit test their code. There are free unit test development tools for Java, C, C++,
The Pragmatic Manager, Volume 2 #1 Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Kill Canceled Projects On the Bookshelf Announcements Want to hear more from Johanna? Want to read more of Johanna’s writing? =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Kill Canceled Projects I’ve worked with several managers and developers who had a difficult time killing cancelled projects. One developer was
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Decreasing Project Completion Time Announcements On the Bookshelf Want to hear more from Johanna? Want to read more of Johanna’s writing? =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Decreasing Project Completion Time Many organizations have a minimum project duration. They can’t complete a project in less than some number of weeks or months. They
The Pragmatic Manager, Volume 1 #4 Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Use Overtime as a Last Resort Announcements On the Bookshelf Want to hear more from Johanna? Want to read more of Johanna’s writing? =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Use Overtime as a Last Resort Overtime is the last degree of flexibility in a project. Unfortunately, too