MPD

Books, MPD

Book Review: Write. Publish. Repeat.

I listen to the selfpublishing podcast. I either listen in the car or on the couch at night. Every so often, Mark wants to know, “Why are you laughing?” Because these guys are funny. Be warned: they swear, a lot. If that offends you, don’t listen. I’ve been listening to their advice about writing, marketing, […]

MPD, project management

Handoffs are Not a Bad Word

I had a great conversation last week with someone taking a leadership course. (Not one of my courses. His instructor wouldn’t talk to him!! He’d seen one of my posts and emailed me. Of course I talked with him.) He was confused by the word “Handoff.” He thought it meant that people hadn’t done their

MPD, workshop

Become an Influential Agile Leader, Toronto and Edinburgh

Are you transitioning to agile? Is it going well? If it your transition is going well, excellent. I’m happy for you. But if you are like many of the leaders across the organization I’ve met, you have plenty of problems. Sometimes you have a problem as this colleague said, Right now we’re really struggling with

management, MPD

How Many People Can You Manage as a Manager?

In my first management role, I “managed” one person.  My managee didn’t need much management. He guided me into how to manage him more than I managed him. He saved me from making too many mistakes. It was great practice for me. Later in my management career, I managed a “team” of 15 testers. They

MPD, project management

Creating a Healthy Project Culture

Glen Alleman seems to have nailed it, with Alert – Was Poor PM the Root Cause of ACA Difficulties? Among the many problems: No overall program manager No way for stakeholders to know what Done looks like (no release criteria) No replanning I’m a huge fan of rolling wave planning.  (Read Starting with Rolling Wave

MPD

Many Slideshares for Your Reading Pleasure

I have posted several slideshares for your reading pleasure. You won’t get the pleasure of my humor, eye rolling and jokes. Nope, for that you would have had to hear me speak. In September, I spoke at AgileSoCal, and had an interactive talk, Agile Teams and Collaboration: What’s New About Agile? I have a small

MPD, project management

Why Do We Estimate, Anyway?

I’ve been thinking about estimation these days. After the healthcare.gov site fiasco, and all the schedule games–many of which are estimation problems, I thought about why we estimate. The larger the effort, the more we need to estimate. And, the more your estimate will be wrong. The more we estimate, the more we have schedule

MPD, project management

Fixing—or Not—Healthcare Dot Gov

Did you see Dwayne Phillips’ post today, Adding People to a Late Project? Dwayne says: Adding people to a late project only makes it later. We have known this for decades. Especially in the article he refers to, it seems as if there might be no end to the number of people added. Did anyone

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