Category Archives: Management
Metrics that mean
We all know this law coined by Elia Goldratt:
Tell me how you’ll measure me, and I’ll tell you how I’ll behave.
This cause-consequence relationship between incentive and action is very important for managers. As with many other things this can be applied on different levels. Consider the difference of measuring someone by number of oranges sold [...]
Change requests: In or Out
Many junior PMs think that Change Requests (in our company we call them Change Orders) always come to project team from the outer space, whenever the client or other stakeholders want to change something, like increase the scope or tighten the schedule. They think that CRs are there to protect the project team from changes [...]
Posted in Management Tagged Change Management, Change Request, Changes, Process, Project management Leave a comment
Inducing a change
I’m currently working on site with client. The other day I had a conversation with one of the project managers and somehow we landed on a topic of inducing a change in organization. Especially, when the change needs to be supported by management and management is not very supportive, because the problem is not very [...]
Can you commit to release date 323 days from now?
Toy Story 3. Release date: June 18, 2010. 323 days from now.
Does not that amaze you? No? Most likely you are not a Project Manager. And certainly not a software Project Manager.
In software world we know how hard estimation is. And to date I have not met a Project Manager, who would commit to a [...]
Posted in Management Tagged Project management, Software engineering, Software estimation Leave a comment
Wimbledon – perfect uncertainty management
For years I’ve been using Wimbledon tournament as an example of really good uncertainty management: with all those games taking very different amounts of time, unpredictable rains (in 2008 man’s final was interrupted twice) – it is a scheduling nightmare. Yet, man’s final always happens on the 2nd Sunday of tournament (except for 2001 when [...]
Don't be a manager like that
If you are a manager, you’ve got everything to prevent this sign from ever appearing near the entrance to you department’s area.
Predictability over… everything
Many years ago when I was at school I was serious about orienting. Once I even was 3rd in national championship. And the trainer always told us “Stability is a sign of mastery”. No matter how fast you are on the training you’ve got to be able to repeat this result in real competitions [...]
Posted in Management Tagged Professional behavior, Project management, Software engineering Leave a comment
Developing software is not enough…
… someone has to be using it.
Guys from 37signals got it right:
It feels great to be done with something on the programming side and then feeling free to move on to the next thing. We all do that at times. But it’s not really real until our users are able to enjoy it.
Way too [...]
Why "agile" is better
Software developers like being “agile”, whatever this means. They say being “agile” liberates their creativity and lets positive energies of the Universe flow through them to the code to (hopefully) solve customer’s problems. They are committed to using all the practices that e.g. XP suggests, but it generally would be better if somebody else [...]
QUOTE: Heroics in the workplace