Three Secrets to Creating Your Focus Time I don’t like multitasking at all. And, I have many projects in progress. How is it possible to jump from one project to another—and not forget where I am? My secret is focus time—small periods of time where I focus-and-finish work. Secret 1: Write down the work you […]
New Year’s Tips for 2017 Other people like to help you plan for resolutions. Well, I’m a bit contrary. I don’t buy this resolution business. I never succeed. (I’m not alone in that.) On the other hand, I like to integrate tips for my next year from my learnings from the previous year. I’ve been
Iterations and Increments: For Any Project A project manager, Dave, is struggling with his project. His organization is not interested in using agile. Agile has a bad name, given their three-time attempt to adopt agile. (I’ll address that problem in another Pragmatic Manager.) That’s fine. Agile is not for everyone. However, Dave knows that prototyping
A cargo cult occurs when people adopt rituals expecting some good behavior to occur. They really don’t know why they are doing these rituals and don’t understand the reasons behind them, yet they keep doing the rituals expecting great results. In this article, I’ll give two contrasting examples that I’m familiar with: Project A talks
How to Avoid Three Big Estimation Traps I bet you need to estimate how large your project or program will be, at the gross level: “It’s bigger than a breadbasket. It’s smaller than a person on the moon.” More likely, “It’s about x people for about y months with this percentage confidence.” Or, you use
Is the Urgent Consuming You? When you start work in the morning, what do you do? Do you check email, listen to your voicemail? Let the urgent take over your day? Do your meetings drive your day? If you do, you are not alone. Is there a better way? There can be. You can take
Emergent Projects: Managing the Unpredictable Are you planning a change project, managing your way through a job search, or some other not-totally-deterministic project? Wouldn’t it be nice if life went according to plan? You could create a roadmap first, estimate how long things would take to get done, create a project plan, and do them.
I was reading Michael Specht’s links of Mar 24, 2006 and found this gem: One Hundred Rules for NASA Project Managers.
Feature Article: Decreasing Project Completion Time, Part 2 Last month, I discussed techniques to decrease project startup time. Now it’s time to look at practices that can decrease project completion time once you’ve started the project. Ask the developers to unit test their code. There are free unit test development tools for Java, C, C++,
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Decreasing Project Completion Time Announcements On the Bookshelf Want to hear more from Johanna? Want to read more of Johanna’s writing? =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Decreasing Project Completion Time Many organizations have a minimum project duration. They can’t complete a project in less than some number of weeks or months. They