We were on vacation last week in Breckenridge, CO. I enjoyed it, although it did take me a few days to acclimate to the 9600 feet altitude. Returning on I-70 East, we saw some great road signs: Truckers don’t be fooled – 4 miles steep grade Truckers you are not done yet – 1. […]
Originally published in Computerworld. Drake, a technical contributor in your group, sends you his weekly status report. He’s been reporting on this six-week task for the past six weeks: Week 1: Task 1 90% done Week 2: Task 1 95% done Week 3: Task 1 96% done Week 4: Task 1 99% done Week 5:
I spoke at a joint meeting of the RI PMI and ASQ last night. My presentation was “Predicting Project Completion.” I offered a simulation for people to try: predicting the time it would take and then sorting two decks of cards. We learned a lot and had fun. At the end of the meeting, one
I just read Jim Coplien’s paper about teaching design called “Close the Window and Put it On the Desktop”. He references the “Rule of Least Surprise,” which is to do the “least surprising thing.” In design, it means the user shouldn’t be surprised or confused by what the program does. But what does it
I’m writing an article about defining the rhythm or cadence of your project and how to increase that, if you want to finish the project faster. I’m a little stuck — at least, if rewriting the whole thing three times is stuck, that’s where I am :-), so here’s another observation about project rhythms.
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
I’m developing a syllabus at the graduate level to teach high tech (if that matters) project management to people without a lot of PM experience. I’m supposed to teach MS Project as the tool project managers schedule the work. I’ve been rejecting the idea that a scheduling tool can teach a new PM how
At Boston SPIN last night, Tim Lister of “Waltzing with Bears” fame gave a talk about recognizing and managing risk. It was great. If you ever have a chance to see Tim speak in person, do so (Yes, Tom DeMarco is also an excellent speaker, but he wasn’t there last night :-). When I
In my last post, I argued that functional and non-functional requirements are unsuitable for the art of describing requirements. I prefer to discuss attributes of the system instead, and then talk about functionality. (Gause and Weinberg wrote Exploring Requirements, Quality Before Design describe how to do this.) But Laurent, in his Misfits, or there’s
In this issue of Better Software, I have the featured article, No More Second Class Testers! and Frank Patrick has a great article, “Promises and Prescriptions, How the Theory of Constraints can help cure common project ailments.” I can’t give you a URL to Frank’s article, but maybe in a month or so he’ll