Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Hal posted his take on 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 (No disagreement from me!) Organizations …
Earlier this week, I was at the Rational User Conference. I was part of a dynamic panel, “The People Factor: Experts Weigh In On The Soft Side of Software.” One question was about how technical managers or project managers have to be. Murray Cantor, one of the other panelists, summed it up this way: …
As you can probably tell, I think people are the most important equation in successful product development. Good people can trump inadequate management and/or an inappropriate process. Dorset House has announced the pre-publication price for my book (available in September). I wrote a little more about this on my Hiring Technical People blog.
I’ve been subjected to a bunch of team building activities that fell flat for me. My Last Word column in this month’s STQE talks about alternatives to team building. Here’s the quick recipe: Choose a topic the team has a vested interest in solving. (If the people can’t come up with one, you don’t have …
Continue reading “I'm Not Against Team Things, Really I'm Not”
In Sunday’s Boston Globe View from the Cube column, Lisa Liberty Becker claims “Telling the truth can be hazardous to your job”. She goes on to talk about her husband, a performance test engineer, whose manager buried his reports, because “they [the reports] reflect poorly on the job he’s done.” The result? Bad product performance, …
Continue reading “Creating Silos Helps Managers Avoid Seeing the Data”