I see people measure all kinds of things in projects. Too often, they are single-point or single-dimension measurements. Those measurements don’t provide you with a good idea about the health of your project. They might be a start. However, they are insufficient. Imagine you, like me, would like to lose some weight. You weigh yourself […]
Johanna’s 2013 New Year’s Tips Every year, I provide you three New Year’s tips, to start your year off right. Here are my three tips for 2013: Tip #1: Experiment. I’ve noticed that many of my clients and colleagues are looking for “best practices.” Well, how about “pretty good” practices or “practices that might work
This is the last in this series of organizing the agile program management posts. It won’t be the last of all the posts, it’s just the last in the series of organizing posts. If I’d realized how many words I was writing in each post I’m not sure I would have started the series. Yes,
Are you working long? My column, Management Myth 10: I can Measure the Work by the Time People Spend at Work is posted today. People who work long hours think they also work hard. They are. But they are often not working smart. If you have a lot to do, you want to work smart,
“Have you heard the new thing that Andrew is doing?” Gabe asked, shaking his head as he headed towards the cafeteria with Cynthia. “No, what?” Cynthia said. “We have to fill out time cards with our actual time on them. He wants to know how much time we really spend at work. The more time,
I’ve encountered a number of projects where people didn’t know the context of their work. As developers, they were working on the thing they had to develop or fix today. They might remember what they had done yesterday, but there was no sense that they knew what they needed to do tomorrow, or that they
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
When it comes to projects, there are as many questions to answer as there are project teams, but “Where are we?” is by far the most popular. The key to understanding a project is to make regular measurements—both quantitative and qualitative—and display the measurements publicly. When project managers display these measurements as part of the
Student Syndrome occurs when the person with the task waits until the last possible moment to start. Some people spend their entire academic career waiting until the night before a project is due and then starting it, pulling an all-nighter, and getting some (hopefully adequate) grade. Student Syndrome isn’t for me, but I know lots
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