I’m busy writing the PM book, and saw these great posts. So instead of making myself crazy trying to write more good stuff for you, I decided you should read these. What is managing software development? is a great read. BTW, the working definition I have of project manager is: the person who knows […]
Anyone out there know Omnigraffle and is willing to help me draw some pictures for the PM book? I have a picture that I want to simplify but I don’t know Omnigraffle well enough to do so. Please send me an email if you do know how and can help me. Update as of
Esther, in her Get out of your way! post describes a situation where by our behaviors, we cause the thing we don’t want to happen. It happened to me this week. I’ve been working on the PM book, and I’ve been struggling with the lifecycle chapter for a couple of months now. Probably longer,
I’m writing my project management book. I have no idea how far along I am. (Wait, I promise to explain.) When I write, I have several phases: the exploratory phase, where I write articles, the write-it-down phase, where I write the whole thing down (in chunks, of course), and the editing phase. I’m in the
I’m writing the project management book. I’m noting that sometimes PMs (and teams) perform activities that have no lasting useful effect on the project. One example is doing estimation with feedback. If you estimate but never check reality against those estimates, that’s an example of “mental masturbation: it feels good but there’s no lasting
I’ve learned about schedule games from lots of people and projects. Here is the list of acknowledgements, as I remember them. If I left anyone off, please let me know. We had a discussion of schedule games on the AYE wiki, which helped me remember just how many games there are. I’m pretty sure I
You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m not enamored of project scheduling tools. And since I most often do rolling wave planning, I don’t normally need a scheduling tool. But, here’s another true story. I was coaching a PM in an organization where the execs only understood the waterfall lifecycle. They thought iterating was a
One of my clients claimed he had ADHD. He had trouble keeping projects focused on one goal. I’ve known him for a while, and he didn’t have this problem when he was a project manager. Nope, he made sure that each project he managed had a goal, and beware any senior manager who wanted to
I perform project and process assessments as part of my consulting work. During one assessment, a senior manager took me aside, and said, “I want you to tell me what you think of our testers.” “All of them?” “Yup.” “Ok, why?” “Well, the developers meet all their milestones, but the testers don’t meet any.” Hmm.
Earlier this week, I was at SPC teaching about project requirements and project management. If you haven’t thought about lifecycles, consider the differences between these kinds of lifecycles: Linear: Waterfall and waterfall with feedback Iterative: Spiral, where the whole product is up for grabs each time Incremental: Where you add to the product in pieces