I’m busy writing the PM book, and saw these great posts. So instead of making myself crazy trying to write more good stuff for you, I decided you should read these. What is managing software development? is a great read. BTW, the working definition I have of project manager is: the person who knows […]
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
So after I posted the Probabilistic Scheduling post, I was working merrily away. I had made some small progress on the book, but was still finishing up other things. Finally, Wednesday I had cleared the entire day to work on the book. I was having trouble with one chapter, so I decided to make
I’m writing the project management book. I’m noting that sometimes PMs (and teams) perform activities that have no lasting useful effect on the project. One example is doing estimation with feedback. If you estimate but never check reality against those estimates, that’s an example of “mental masturbation: it feels good but there’s no lasting
I’m in the midst of writing the PM book (which is why I haven’t blogged much). One of my tips is that projects have both requirements and goals–and that the PM (at least) needs to know the difference. A requirement can be a use case, user story, a shall statement, whatever. So can a
It’s been quite the Monday so far. My office toilet started spewing water, a cabinet door fell off one of the cabinets in the kitchen, and I’m trying to back up and duplicate my hard disk because both latches on my Powerbook broke at the Agile conference and I need to send my computer
Several years ago, a colleague emailed me, asking how to keep sponsors involved. My colleague was using company-mandated phase-gate lifecycle with long project durations (18-24 months). I’d recommended providing a project dashboard and showing the sponsor progress. My colleague was stumped–the dashboard wasn’t particularly helpful until they were in the testing phase and it
I was at the Better Software conference last week, met a bunch of great people (including Jim Shore and Joel Spolsky). Another important person is someone who’s not famous–and important nevertheless. A senior tester explained her situation and asked for some help. “Most of our testers can’t read code. And, we don’t know what
When I teach project management, I ask the participants to create a project charter (See my templates page for one I use to start). I recently encountered a battered project manager who does not have a project charter for a project with 6 or 7 sub-projects. This PM is smart, but has never managed a
Given the thoughtful comments on Architects Must Write Code and Testing Design, I’m wondering if some of the difference in our beliefs stem from our perceptions of the architect’s role. I see the architect as the technical lead who shepherds a product through the overall design, someone who explains enough about the system and