Earlier this week, I was at the Rational User Conference. I was part of a dynamic panel, “The People Factor: Experts Weigh In On The Soft Side of Software.” One question was about how technical managers or project managers have to be. Murray Cantor, one of the other panelists, summed it up this way: […]
Hal’s post about the meaning of project management got me thinking about accountability and how we use it in organizations. In the last three weeks, I’ve heard these definitions: “I want to know who’s accountable. Who do I get to fire if they screw up?” “The testers/project manager/management team is accountable for the bugs.
Every so often, I hear managers say things they vowed they’d never say when they were technical contributors. (Yeah, parents do that too, but that’s not the topic today 🙂 Here are a few of my favorites with their translations: “We have expertise in that area.” Translation: We have no idea what you’re talking about,
I had a lovely dinner with Brian Marick and our spouses Saturday night. (Now that he’s blogrolled me, I can’t tease him about that. Thanks, Brian!) Two things made me reconsider the way I manage people while managing a project: things we discussed at dinner, and Brian’s recent posting about the explicit role of the
Last night at dinner, a friend said, “They love us. We’re only 4.8 FTEs, and (the rest of the organization) thinks we do the work of 6 people.” Guess what? There are 6 people. Not all of them work full time, which is why there are only 4.8 FTE (full time equivalents) for the
This past weekend, my husband insisted we clean up the basement, and go through a bunch of old boxes. I discovered performance evaluations, memos, status reports, and some project plans dating back from when I started working until I started my business. I discovered a major pattern about my approach to work: Since I’ve never
Some of you are probably trying to plan your vacation around the project you’re on. Good luck. Every time I did that, the project was in some crucial place and my bosses asked me to consider changing my vacation. Don’t give in to their pleading. If the project is in good shape, you being
When we think about manufacturing work, we measure labor productivity as the ratio of the output of goods and services to the labor hours devoted to the production of that output, output per hour. (See U.S. Dept of Labor) Remember the discussion of Project Constraints and Requirements? That’s where I said the project requirements were
In the past few weeks, too many managers have written to me, asking for help on knowing how “good” their people are. When I ask more questions, such as “What does good mean to you?”, they say they want to know who’s most productive. Then I walk through this analysis with them: Productivity is
I’m a big fan of one-on-one meetings between the manager (or project manager) and the employee. Private meetings provide the manager a chance to see project and personal status in a way that group meetings and email status reports don’t. I wrote an article for Software Development about one-on-ones. BTW, if you’re using group