Blogs

But Is It Possible?

Your manager, Ellsworth, asks you, “But is it possible?” He wants you to tell him that it is possible for you to satisfy a project milestone despite the argument you presented him for the past five minutes that the milestone was unrealistic. You feel like you are on the witness stand. Jack McCoy, the character [...]

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Office Hoteling

What is office hoteling? Why is the practice spreading? What are the unintended consequences of its usage? Office hoteling changes the traditional model for how office space is used. Rather than assign permanent office space to each employee, hoteling is a system for assigning just-in-time temporary office space to employees. The hoteling systems I’ve experienced [...]

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Rethinking Measurement Concepts, Part 1

What is a measurement? I would answer a careful observation. Ponder the following questions as you encounter measurements today: What observations do you trust? What observations are you skeptical about? What observations do you believe are phony? What observations don’t have any value? What new observations would have value?

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Brownfield Software System

The term brownfield site means real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant. Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Does the term brownfield software system have merit? I’m not sure. Let’s step back and explore. I thought my use [...]

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People Act Like Themselves

When you interview for your next job, I recommend analyzing how people treated you during the hiring process. Why? The treatment you receive will mirror the treatment you will receive on the job. For instance, analyze the responsiveness of the people involved in your hiring process. If people were responsive to scheduling appointments and answering [...]

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Critical Lesson in Estimation

What critical lesson have I learned about the process of making an estimate? Have your most pragmatic, experienced people do the estimate. Minimize the number of people who are members of the estimating team. A team size of three, in my experience, is ideal. That’s enough members to trigger divergent estimates, which creates arguments, which [...]

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Process Revelation

A participant in a workshop that I led drew the above picture to describe the role he played in his company’s process: Do drawings help members of a team to better reveal their point of view? In my experience, they do. But more importantly, the process of drawing with virtually no constraints helps the drawer [...]

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The Effective Project Manager

What do effective project managers realize? If a project fails, it’s the PM’s fault. If a project succeeds, the PM credits the team for the success.

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People versus Process Orientation

People have passionately argued about whether people are more important than process or process is more important than people. Tune in; for instance, a colleague writes passionately about the triumph of people over process. Another colleague writes passionately about the importance of heroes. A pundit writes passionately about how great systems (process) are more important [...]

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Trade-off: Go For Speed

The people whose opinion counts the most choose to go for faster delivery speed. Their thinking may be sound; in this case, they want to beat their competitors to market. Choosing faster product delivery visibly sacrifices product quality and, in my experience, it often invisibly sacrifices the economy of product support. In this post, I [...]

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