Many writers struggle with perfection. They interrupt themselves with editing and trying to make the writing “perfect.” In their pursuit of perfection, they don’t finish and publish. But not publishing creates two problems: Not publishing means the writer receives no feedback. Sometimes, that means the writer stops writing. Worse, the writer continues to try to […]
This is the June 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. A newsletter reader asked me this question: Are there common reasons that projects fail? There are. These reasons aren’t just for product development projects, but for any effort that has some risk and requires
Ever since I was on the Troubleshooting Agile podcast, I’ve followed Squirrel and Jeffrey. (I highly recommend their podcast.) Recently, Squirrel posted something fascinating on LinkedIn: Aim for a “single source of lies” about your business. That’s quite a provocative idea, especially when many of us persist in looking for a “single source of truth.”
Program sponsors and the teams themselves want to know where they are in the program. What’s started? What’s not? How much more remains? It’s tempting to measure “everything.” That creates another problem: You might spend too much time attempting to gather data that doesn’t provide enough information. You might even miss seeing the real progress
Most of us track faults (also called defects, problems, issues, bugs) during the system test part of the project. However, many project managers don’t track how many of our fixes are successful and how many fixes are bad — either introducing a new defect or not completely fixing the original defect. If you’re looking for