Attempting to Define Maintenance
I’ve had several discussions about maintenance in the past few days. I’m beginning to think I have a different definition of maintenance than other people do :-). For me, maintenance is fixing...
View ArticleOrganizing for "Efficiency"
I gave a talk at the local PDMA group called “Setting Expectations Between Engineering and the Three PMs”, attempting to clarify how the roles of product management, program management, and project...
View ArticleSchedule Game #6: Sweep Under the Rug
A few years ago, I received a call to help out a project in trouble. Unsurprisingly, when I was reviewing what had been done and what still left to do, the PM explained there were many...
View ArticleAssembly Line vs. Implement by Feature
I taught a project management workshop earlier this week. I include a small project as part of the workshop, so participants can practice planning, organizing, and a little steering of a project in a...
View Article"Complete" and "Freeze" Aren't
I had a discussion recently with a manager who was concerned about his developers meeting their milestones. “We have “Code Complete” as a milestone. The developers say they meet it, but that just...
View ArticleImplementation by Feature and Embedded Systems Issues
I’ve been working with some companies who do hardware/software systems. Most often, they have some embedded code too, just to make life interesting. To be honest, I don’t know how to do...
View ArticleMeasuring Project Completion Progress
I taught my project dashboard workshop today. One of the things most people want to measure is progress towards project completion. But you can’t measure project completion progress unless you have...
View ArticleAre Your Defects Like Potholes?
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...
View ArticleWhen You're in Chaos, Try Baby Steps
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...
View ArticleIs Your Product Development Half-Actions?
Via Jack Vinson, I found this gem: Stop doing half-actions. All of you who are separating your developers from your testers? You are doing half-actions. Separating the writers from the developers and...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....