Vol 9, #3: Always Ask the Zeroth Question About Your Projects Jan 17, 2012, ISSN: 2164-1196 Sometimes, you wonder why you are doing this project. You spend all this time on it, you’re sure there isn’t much value from the project, and still, the project is on the top of your manager’s list. There’s […]
I have posted last week’s Pragmatic Manager, Are You Being Guilted Into Doing More?. At Agile 2011, I had a great video conversation with Shane Hastie about agile project portfolio management. The chair is big, I’m not so short. The chair is big, I’m not so short. How many times do you think I have
Are You Being Guilted Into Doing More? Ned, a development manager I know, looked exhausted. “I’m trying to keep development going, and support pre-sales, and support post-sales, and support customer support. When is my group supposed to have time to do development??” He has a point. If his team does all the nice-guy work, they
Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. Vol 9, #1: Are Your “Shoulds” Driving Your Decisions? Jan 6, 2012 ISSN: 2164-1196 In This Issue:
Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. Vol 8, #9: Focus On One Thing at a Time Dec 30, 2011 ISSN: 2164-1196 In This Issue:
I caught up with posting a couple of Pragmatic Manager email newsletters last week. My January email was Why Multitasking Doesn’t Work. The April email was Agile Programs: Possible or a Pipe Dream. If you subscribed, you’d have read them by now.
I did decide to talk about how we got started on 100% utilization and what to do about it. I didn’t say everything I wanted to say, so here is what I wish I’d said: How 100% Utilization Got Started Back in the early days of computing, machines were orders of magnitude more expensive than
Why Multitasking Doesn’t Work In the last Pragmatic Manager, Start Small, I explained how to start small, and invited you to email me if you were trying to multitask among several projects, but couldn’t make it work. Several of you did. In this Pragmatic Manager, I’m going to walk you through what happens and the
Daniel wrote a lovely post, Kill, commit, or transform your projects over on praglife. Keeping projects around that are not staffed, multitasking on several projects (committing to none of them), and running away from reality doesn’t help anyone. The projects don’t finish faster–they finish, if at all, slower. The people don’t have a sense of
Agile projects, especially if you are starting your agile transition, can have plenty of problems. Some are technical debt problems, such as the build taking too long or having insufficient automated tests to know if your changes are helping or hurting the system. But there’s another insidious management problem when many teams transition to agile: