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 […]
A reader was reading Characteristics of Great Project Managers and asked, “Do you feel that to be a great Project Manager one need not know completely about the technology involved?” No. Project managers need to understand enough about the technology so that they can make tradeoff decisions (or help product owners make tradeoff decisions) about
I was talking with Don Gray this morning about our work on the AYE Conference. I’m the marketing chair, he’s the program chair. We were discussing the sessions we have so far, and I said we could put one of the management sessions into the team effectiveness track. “No,” Don said, “Managers aren’t part
Matisse has an interesting post, Software is like Building Construction. He talks about iterative design and the interdependencies of people with deliverables as being common to construction and software. In my opinion, he’s not all wrong, but he’s not all right. I agree that there are plenty of design-build firms who wait until the
I have an opportunity to review process documentation (actual and proposed) from many organizations. I admit, I have a prejudice for more Agile techniques (integrated into any lifecycle). But non-Agile techniques work too. Here’s what I find doesn’t work: making the process dependent on the personalities of the people who have to carry out
Alan Weiss, author of Million Dollar Consulting, advises consultants to drop the bottom 10% of their work every year. That way you have to force yourself to grow and offer new (frequently more lucrative) offerings. The same advice applies to managers. When I teach management, I explain that managers have three responsibilities: To deliver
We talk blithely about the “crisis” in software development or IT. But most of the time, that’s just projects over schedule, over budget, and under featured. Real project crises are about people. I heard that one of my clients died today. She was a young-ish project manager. I’d never met her in person (she
I’ve been thinking about project retrospectives. Too few project teams participate in end-of-the-project retrospectives, and to few managers arrange for them. My clients seem concerned by the price of an outside facilitator and the cost in time to the next project. To address the facilitator cost, I’ve suggested that any facilitator not on the
You’re a project manager. Your project is proceeding fairly well. You’ve had a few bumps, but you’re making progress. You come into work one day, and there’s a message to meet with the Big Cheese. Big Cheese says, “Stop working on that project. Start on this one!” Not only does this happen once, it
I’ve been meaning to write a series of posts on schedule games, and a story I heard over the weekend has jolted me into writing about schedule chicken. I’m most familiar with schedule chicken that happens in meetings. Usually in a project status meeting, with the project manager and the project team, especially where