The nice folks at ScheduleMailer interviewed me about how I accomplish what I do. They consider me a time management expert. That’s what project portfolio management will do for you. I thought it was funny that one of the questions was about work/life balance. I wanted to say, “Honey, it’s all life.” I managed to […]
I read Sayonara Sony: How Industrial, MBA-Style Leadership Killed a Once Great Company, and was struck by how the company appeared to make decisions—what will make us the most money now? If you make your project portfolio decisions based on money, estimated cost, you too will have Sony’s problems. This is why cost is the
I just read Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work. For me, it was a mixed read. Yes, you can make a totally distributed team work. What you need to do: Make all of the work visible Keep everyone focused on one project at a time Keep all of the
I was in the midst of an assessment when the CIO came to me, and shut the door. “I have a serious question for you.” I nodded for him to continue. I put aside my papers to show him I was providing him my undivided attention. “I’m thinking of offshoring all the testers. What do
If you read my most recent post, Comparing Teams Is Not Useful: Exposing Another Management Myth and the comments, you will see that I rant about the business of normalizing story points for predicting cost or schedule for a program. That led to several comments re SAFe for programs or other frameworks or lifecycles for
Every so often, managers want to compare teams. You’ve heard this in several ways: Managers want teams to “normalize” their story points, so they can better predict the cost or schedule for the rest of the backlog in large programs. This doesn’t work, but managers want to do it anyway. Managers want to compare teams
Are you going to Agile 2013? If you are, maybe these tips will help you. Consider using the schedule planner app to remind you of the sessions you thought you wanted to attend. However, don’t be bound to those sessions. You might meet someone in the hall, or at a meal, have a conversation, and
A few weeks ago, Dave Prior interviewed me for Projects at Work. He posted that interview as a podcast. Yes, registration is required. We spoke about Personal Kanban, my process for getting my work to done, how I carve out time for intellectual work, how I protect that time, how I iterate on my work,
My most recent column on projectmanagement.com, Using Release Trains to Get on Track is up. It’s another one of those columns that addresses the question, “What do you do in a program with agile and non-agile projects?” I hope you enjoy it.
Do you want to immortalize your agile team? Would you like to contribute to the research about how agile teams collaborate? If so, have I got a deal for you. My friend and colleague, David Socha, a professor at the University of Washington, in the Seattle area is writing a grant for the NSF to