I’m now the proud and happy owner of a new reservoir for our tankless hot water heater. (Tankless is a relative term, when it comes to hot water heaters.) A week ago, the reservoir part of our system finally broke. We had a new reservoir installed on Wednesday, and our lives have changed for the […]
Seth Godin has a great entry, Saying ‘no’. No is the essence of project portfolio management, no matter who you are. If you don’t say No, your yes’s don’t mean anything. As Seth says, Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.
I’m in some variety of “final” editing on Manage Your Project Portfolio. I’ve reorganized the first chapter into two chapters, rewritten a bunch of things, added a new zero-sum game, and have managed to tighten up some of the writing. I’ve received great feedback from Esther, Don, and Dwayne that I’m still incorporating into my
I’m in what might be close-to-final editing on Manage Your Project Portfolio. Not everyone understands all my references for things. For example, one of my reviewers did not know what a backlog is. Since I hope that managers of every level will read this book, it’s entirely possible they may not all know what a
I get to see a lot of meeting behavior. A few rules I use for meetings: End the meeting at 5 minutes before the hour. Most people have another meeting starting on the hour, and this gives them a shot at transportation and bio-break time. Ask people to turn off phones, laptops, etc directly. If
I taught my estimation workshop twice last week and once the week before, and one thing remains true: Estimation depends on the project lifecycle, how the project is organized, the state of the requirements, and the number of people you have available. I used a number of simulations to help people see how to estimate,
I’ve discussed this situation with several managers recently. The manager says, “I have a wonderful developer, who can code circles around everyone else. If he doesn’t like someone else’s code, he rewrites it over the weekend. If he sees a hole, he writes a ton of code over the weekend He starts work early and
Remember Why Projects Don’t Need Specialists? Well, I decided I had a little more to say. I decided to write an article, What’s So Special About Specialists? Please do comment there or here.
Last Tuesday, I had a blast at Boston SPIN. I led a roundtable about transitioning to agile, and discovered that not everyone takes the feedback the timebox gives them. In this case, people weren’t finishing what they “attempted to commit to” in the timebox, but they extended the timebox. I suggested that was not such
Jurgen asked me to help publicize his survey. Ok, I’ve done it. Now, let me rant about explain why I think surveys like this are not useful, and may be harmful. A survey does not take your context into account. Surveys about any practices without considering the industry, the products, and the management don’t tell