Manage “When” With a Parking Lot I’ve received several comments on the most recent Pragmatic Managers: Create Successful Schedules and Three Secrets to Creating Your Focus Time. Then, the writer asks, “What do I do when I have way too much to do?” Use a parking lot. Sometimes, I use a parking lot to kill
Ryan Ripley interviewed me on his podcast, Agile for Humans 83 about Create Your Successful Agile Project. We had a blast. I didn’t stint on my opinions or on my experience with agile teams. One of those opinions was about teambuilding, which I wrote about in Creating an Environment of Teamwork. The other opinion (based on
Henny Portman just published a review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. See his review at Review: Manage your project portfolio. He included a terrific image (go to the review to see it) about how you can think about the entire process, from soup to nuts. Here is an excerpt from his conclusion: “… a must
In the “Scaling” Agile: Part 1, I wrote about cross-functional collaborative teams. The cross-functional collaborative feature team is the basis for “scaling” agile. In “Scaling” Agile, Part 2, I wrote about programs. I realized I need another part before my original part 3 :-). This new part 3 is about creating agile product development capabilities.
Do You Have Too Much to Do? If you are like most of the people I work with and meet, you have too much to do. You’d like to say, “No!” to more work, but maybe you’re not sure how. The first step is to gather all the work, so you and everyone else knows
Andy Hunt, the Pragmatic Bookshelf publisher, just sent me an email telling me that Manage Your Project Portfolio is featured in La República, Columbia’s “first and most important business newspaper.” That’s because getabstract liked it! Okay, my book is below the fold. It’s in smaller print. And, I have to say, I’m still pretty excited. If
Summary: It is unfortunate that the department attending to employees is called “Human Resources.” That language colors what managers call people in the organization. But the more you call people “resources,” the more they become interchangeable—and more like desks, or infrastructure, or something that is easily negotiable. Resources are not people. People are not resources.
Peter, a CTO in a small company, shook his head. I have no idea what I am going to do. My CEO wants me to do everything. But I can’t. I don’t have the staff. We don’t know how to scale the PerfApp. We don’t know how to test the NewApp, because we don’t have
I’m not a fan of using schedule or cost estimate as a way to value the projects in your project portfolio. If you do, you are likely to miss the potentially transformative projects or programs. In Manage Your Project Portfolio, I have an entire chapter devoted to ways to evaluate your project portfolio: business value
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