Just in case you hadn’t heard enough from me about inch-pebbles, here’s an article I wrote for Computerworld.com. Bloglet readers, it’s possible I have finally convinced Bloglet there’s nothing wrong with my blog. You’ve missed a couple of weeks worth of postings. Sorry about that.
Originally published in Computerworld. Drake, a technical contributor in your group, sends you his weekly status report. He’s been reporting on this six-week task for the past six weeks: Week 1: Task 1 90% done Week 2: Task 1 95% done Week 3: Task 1 96% done Week 4: Task 1 99% done Week 5:
Rick commented on my last post that some engineers think that status checking slows them down. Mark said that engineers push back on demos and pointless measurements and then said in another comment, “progress metrics can always be free.” Here’s how and what I look for, to determine status. If I’m managing a traditionally-planned
Last night at my SPIN talk someone came up to me at the end of the talk. I’d discussed earned value and inch-pebbles in my talk but hadn’t specifically discussed how to avoid the dreaded “percent complete” reporting problem to management. The percent complete problem occurs when you have to report progress to management as
I was extremely fortunate in my choice of companies and work early in my career. I developed in assembly language and microcode and Fortran for a few years. Then, I moved to object oriented languages, primarily at Symbolics, using LISP. At Symbolics (I left in 1990), we practiced incremental development, iterative planning, and some
© 1999 Johanna Rothman “When will the project be ready for Beta?” “I think it will be ready next month. We’re more than 90% done.” “NEXT MONTH? You said ‘next month’ last month. You said you were more than 90% done last month too. We’re slipping this project a month every month. WHEN will you