I’m particular about two things: calling a prose plan a project plan and calling a Gantt chart (or yellow stickies) a schedule. One of my colleagues emailed me last week, explaining he’d spent a week developing a project plan and was hoping I could take a look at it. “Sure,” I said. “Send it along.” […]
I’ve signed all the paperwork, so now it’s official. I will be offering a public project management workshop September 22-24, 2008 in Waltham, Massachusetts. The workshop syllabus is at Manage It! Pragmatic Project Management Workshop. Everyone receives a copy of Manage It! plus a workbook for your writing and working through the workshop. Have questions?
Summary: Long-time advocate of status reports, Johanna Rothman has come across a new way of reporting the movement of a project using something we experience every day—the weather. In this week’s column, she sheds a little sunshine on this new technique, which demonstrates the status of a project a lot like meteorologists announce current weather
I gave a talk at a local ICCA chapter last night, and met a project manager who told me he was managing 7 projects. I must have lost my poker face, because he chuckled and said, “Well, you do what you can with that many projects.” You do. And I don’t buy that you’re actually
You’ve got a ton of projects. You can’t do them all at once because you don’t have the people to do them. You know better than to ask people to multitask on more than one project—no one will get anything done. One tactic is to organize the projects into a portfolio and rank them by
About a month ago, I spoke with a project manager who’d inherited a project in chaos. No one was making progress. He was stumped–he’d never worked on a project where the developers couldn’t do anything, the testers couldn’t do anything, and time was just slipping away. I suggested he try baby steps. What’s the first
Here’s a common scenario I was discussing with a colleague last night: They’re at the end of a project. They used some combination of a serial lifecycle, becoming more incremental as they proceed through the project. But they still have a ton of open defects, and a few not-quite-finished features. My colleague was complaining about
In one of the comments, for When is a Scrum Master (or a PM) Not?, Craig Brown said Process, process, process. What about people? At the end of the day the process is just one of several enabers (alongside culture, technology and tools, etc.) Won’t an experienced and talented team just deliver regardless of the
I’ve been busy the last few weeks (as you can tell by the paucity of posts :-). I’ve been working with project managers, Scrum Masters, and technical leads who have been thrust into the role of Scrum Master. Here are some examples of the problems these nice folks have had: “When I want to use
Adam, from Write That Down, likes Manage it!. Here’s what he has to say: There is a great book called Manage It!, by Johanna Rothman. She does not disappoint, and really gets into the nitty gritty details about managing projects. While this is billed as a “project management” effort, it really does apply to product