My PM students are articulating insights about projects that I’m happy to see. One project team said this in their charter, “The value of the product is moving the paper successfully across the room. The value of the project is in the journey, not the destination.” Some projects exist to see if the project […]
Now that I’m back from vacation, I’m catching up on my reading. I enjoyed David Anderson’s Management versus Leadership on ‘The Apprentice’ which prompted me to think about what I would have done in Kwame’s place. It took me a long time to learn, but a manager always has the option of firing people who
You’re a project manager. You have too much work to fit into a project (scope) and not enough time to do it. What do you do? Timebox. Timeboxing is a technique to fit what you can accomplish (some of the scope) into the time you have allotted. Timeboxing works when you have fixed schedule
A client was optimizing for what they thought was the bottleneck in their software development: the testers. In the assessment, I gathered some quantitative data about how long the testers took to test and how long it took for the other groups to perform their work. (They used a phased lifecycle.) The testers were
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
At first, when Hal posted State of the Art of Project Management — Underlying Theory is Obsolete I wasn’t sure what he meant by #9: “Project portfolio management is an excuse not to manage each project. Each project team must be set-up for success.” Now in PMO: Obsolete Before It Gets Off the Ground, I
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.
Laurent’s post, The team building lunch prompted a bunch of (hopefully now organized) thoughts about the role of food in high tech projects. One of the things I notice when I perform assessments is whether there is some sort of cafeteria or other food-eating place. Projects that have a physical place large enough for
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