I facilitated a project management clinic last week at PSL. One of the questions was this: We have a product owner who persists in changing the contents of the sprint during the sprint. This is difficult for us. It costs us to change the content. Okay, this is a huge pain in the tush. It’s […]
In my talk, How Much Will this Project Cost? at Agile 2012 last week, I got to say, “Short is beautiful.” For those of you who have never seen me, I’m five feet tall. The question was something like this: For programs, don’t you want longer iterations, so people don’t have the overhead of planning,
If you are planning a vacation, read my next management myth, Management Myth #7: I Am too Valuable to Take a Vacation. It doesn’t matter where you are in the organization, you need to take a vacation. And, you need to totally remove yourself from the day-to-day grind when you do. Read it.
I’ve been talking to a variety of potential clients about their project portfolios. One of the big problems is how to see all the work. Some of these folks have multiple kinds of projects, so they want to show their work in a variety of ways. What do you do when you have a few
I’m giving a talk at Agile 2012, entitled “How Much Will This Project Cost?” It doesn’t seem to matter what life cycle your project has, someone wants you to predict the cost. The problem is, it’s the wrong question. But, that won’t stop people from asking it anyway. People want to know the cost so
I’ll be in Sao Paulo, Brazil, teaching project portfolio management, Sept 10-11, 2012. I’ll be teaching in English. I suspect that the class will simulate and interact with each other in Portugese! I’ll be the one who is left out. (That’s what I do when I teach in a non-English speaking country.) We have 5
I wrote the first of a three-part series about looking at culture when you hire people last month. I posted that Pragmatic Manager, Your Culture: What is Okay for You to Discuss? and forgot to tell you. If you are on my email list, you received today’s Pragmatic Manager about what the organization values and
I’m not a rabid football fan. I enjoy the game, but I can happily breeze through the fall without realizing which teams are where in the standings. And, when it comes to the college teams, I have no clue. So, when the whole Paterno/Sandusky scandal broke, I first thought, “Oh, Joe Paterno was supposed to
I’ve been having some email conversations with some project and program managers turned Scrum Masters. In general here’s how things have proceeded: Their organizations decided agile was a great idea Their organizations decided Scrum was a great idea to implement agile (because they don’t know the difference between Scrum and agile) The teams started working
Have you been in a position where you–or your manager–wanted to save a difficult employee? Maybe you felt as if you bent over backwards to save an employee? Don’t do it. In this myth, Management Myth #6, I Can Save Everyone, I confront the myth that every employee somehow has a place at every organization.