Do you know about the Cost of Delay? It’s the way to think about the revenue you can lose plus the cost of continued development. One of my managers many years ago had a back of the napkin approach to cost of delay. “Johanna, we want to ship this product in the second quarter this
Back in More Interview Questions Not to Ask, Part 1, I said that hiring managers and teams should not ask irrelevant questions. Some of you here, and on LinkedIn and Facebook asked, “How do we answer these questions?” Here’s how you do it. If someone asks you “Who do you most admire and why?” use
I saw this TedX talk, Adam Leipzig: How to Know Your Life Purpose in 5 Minutes. He says you need to ask these five questions: Who are you? Answer with your first name. What do you do? What do you love to do? What is the one thing you feel supremely qualified to teach other
I read Sayonara Sony: How Industrial, MBA-Style Leadership Killed a Once Great Company, and was struck by how the company appeared to make decisions—what will make us the most money now? If you make your project portfolio decisions based on money, estimated cost, you too will have Sony’s problems. This is why cost is the
I’m at the SHRM conference in Chicago this week, courtesy of Dice.com. I blog for them, and am working on an agile recruiting series. Watch for it, in the coming weeks. I read this piece, The War for STEM Talent is a Lie. I agree. Until we do all of these things: Hire the people
One of the most difficult parts of project portfolio management is deciding how to rank the projects — that is, determining which projects should be done now, later, and, most importantly, never. There are several ways to rank a project portfolio. Each is useful in specific situations and not so useful in others. But all
I was talking with a client recently, who was professing his desire for younger candidates. “Can anyone older than 35 or 40 really know anything?” was his concern. I sat there, a little nonplussed. “How old do you think I am?” I paused. “No, don’t answer that. Just remember that age is not the issue.
Dave Larribee has a great post, The High Cost of Losing a Developer. (Discovered via an ericlandes tweet) Dave suggested it might take a couple of years investment in terms of salary to make a developer productive. My experience is that it takes about 6 months of that developer and some number of months of
I wa just reading recent grad frustrated by job search, and want to highlight something many candidates, even experienced candidates, forget: Remember, a hiring manager is going to spend maybe a minute (or less) on the initial scan of your resume. What do you want her to see in that minute — a list of
George Dinwiddie asked me a question in email, “Why do companies hire junior-level contractors? I feel bad about spending the company’s money trying to teach these junior contractors to be better software developers. A junior-level direct hire makes sense, as you expect them to be around long enough that the education pays off. But a