I’ve been thinking a lot about impossible schedules. I’m talking about the project schedules that no matter how you organize the project, it’s not possible for this group of people to cram that set of features into this much time. At least, the developers don’t think so. If people are up against impossible schedules, […]
I asked my project management students to create a project dashboard for the projects they’re organizing, so we can talk about what happens when the indicators go up down or sideways. One of the teams came up with a “risk constellation” chart — which I thought was a brilliant way to show risks. (If
I’m a Tour de France addict. I bicycle like those guys only in my dreams. But when I was watching the race last night, I realized something: the riders who are in a position to win the Tour are adaptable riders. They don’t excel at just sprinting, or just mountains, or just rolling-hills, or
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
I’m supposed to be on the other coast right now. But since I start from Boston, and this Nor’easter has taken over, I’m going nowhere fast. When I planned the trip and the client work, I’d allowed about a half-day of slack in the travel. That’s normally enough. Not this time 🙂 When you
From the “I wish I’d said that” list: Via Frank Patrick’s blog, Mike Cohn, in his User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development. Chapter 10, Why Plans Go Wrong in pdf, explains buffers and padding and scheduling: “A Buffer Isn’t Padding — A buffer isn’t padding. Padding is extra time added to a schedule that
In a question to yesterday’s post, Bill asked about the effect of multiple ideas for problem solving: “Do readers feel they have to follow one of your multiple True Ways now? Or does the multiplicity meta-message encourage them to generate even more ideas?” Sometimes and Yes. Some people are even more impatient than I