I’m particular about two things: calling a prose plan a project plan and calling a Gantt chart (or yellow stickies) a schedule. One of my colleagues emailed me last week, explaining he’d spent a week developing a project plan and was hoping I could take a look at it. “Sure,” I said. “Send it along.” […]
Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. Pragmatic Manager, Vol. 5 #3, Timeboxes Help Multisite Teams April 29, 2008 Feature Article: Timeboxes Help Multisite Teams I love timeboxing my work. Timeboxing–choosing a period of time in which to finish a specific task–helps me stay focused on just one thing at a time. Imagine you’ve estimated you have
About a month ago, I spoke with a project manager who’d inherited a project in chaos. No one was making progress. He was stumped–he’d never worked on a project where the developers couldn’t do anything, the testers couldn’t do anything, and time was just slipping away. I suggested he try baby steps. What’s the first
It’s winter here in Massachusetts, and we’ve had lots of snow, ice, rain, snow, ice, snow, ice, rain. All that freezing and melting plays havoc with the roads. We have lots of potholes, and the local and state governments are busy doing emergency repairs all over the place. (For those of you who don’t know
Here’s a common scenario I was discussing with a colleague last night: They’re at the end of a project. They used some combination of a serial lifecycle, becoming more incremental as they proceed through the project. But they still have a ton of open defects, and a few not-quite-finished features. My colleague was complaining about
I’ve been teaching a project management workshop, and one of the participants said something brilliant: “If you estimate in days, you’ll be off by days. If you estimate in weeks, you’ll be off by weeks.” If you estimate in months, you will be off by months. Here’s why. The more you can break a big
In For a more productive team, put the pressure on (within reason), Chris Hoover recommends a little pressure to help the procrastinators un-procrastinate, and help people get their work done on time. I only sort-of agree. Everyone has their own amount of pressure, and what’s good for you is not good for me. But working
As part of some recent consulting and training, one of the project managers asked, “How do you make time for innovation in timeboxes? If everyone’s busy all the time, how can you allow people time to think for real innovation?” Good question. I asked how people had time for innovation now. The PM wasn’t
I’ve taught several workshops where people wanted to learn how to start adopting some agile approaches. They knew about timeboxing, but didn’t quite see how to make it work. The part they were missing was having working valuable product at the end of each timebox. I explain that to the participants, and they nod sagely.
I plan on about 6 hours of work in a regular day. That’s project work, not answering the phone, email, making arrangements for workshops or consulting or speaking, or invoicing, or any of the other things I do. Nope, that’s just project work. The other half of that question is how many regular days