It’s been a heck of a week. My office is in my basement (a walk-out basement with lots of light–it doesn’t feel like a basement). Earlier this week, I thought I had a leak in the foundation–there was a small damp spot in the rug. I called the basement people to make appointments. Of […]
I’m in conversation with a client about a possible project. The Big Guy wanted to meet with me immediately, but had constrained time, so I shifted my schedule and met with him. It was clear from our conversation that he didn’t quite know what he wanted, but he did want a proposal from me.
Want to make sure you complete your project as early as possible? Define release criteria. Release criteria are the few critically important objective criteria that define what “done” means for your project. Sometimes, it’s a combination of date, defects, and feature completion. Sometimes it’s just the date. The formula for defining release criteria is: Define
A colleague emailed me a few days ago, and asked “for a code base with a [given size], what can we expect to see for numbers of defects per KLOC (given the actual industry average or given what the industry believes we should expect). We need some way of gauging whether or not our
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’ve been thinking a lot about the comments people made on the Best Practices Don’t Predict Project Success post. (Thank you for your comments.) Here’s my experience. Great people, people with sufficient functional skills and domain expertise can trump process, good or bad. Good process, process appropriate for the context, will help those people. But great people
I received an intriguing email this week asking this question: ” [..]if we were to put a quantitative value against each best practice, summed them up, and compared the total against a possible maximum could we have a predictor of project success?” No is the short answer. Here’s why: People need to first select which
Hal posted his take on creating faster cheaper projects. (See Creating Faster Cheaper Projects.) I see that I did not make my assumptions clear in my original post. Hal had three problems (at least!) with my post: Fewer people increase the length of the project. The longer the project, the more the requirements will change
It’s fall conference season, and I’ve been quiet because of the travel and final preparations for sessions. One of my sessions at the AYE conference is called Predicting Project Completion. I decided it was time to explore how to predict the end of a project when I encountered two clients this year. One made
In his comment to my previous post, Babu said, “unqualified project managers quickly sink a project which would’ve otherwise fared better.” (Keith, I’ll respond to your next comment in another post.) I’ve had the pleasure of meeting great project managers, and some not-so-great project managers. Here’s my list of necessary skills for great project