Project Managers, How To Stop Making The Same Old Mistakes
Yet study after study, analyst after analyst, say that developers are making the same mistakes they made in 2000. That they made in 1990. And earlier.
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Project Managers Follow The Crowd As Your Last Resort
Should we simply follow the crowd until we found something that suggests another course of action?
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Do We Manage Projects By Intuition or by Methodology?
What happens if we are not using a method? What do we call it then? I call it management by intuition. Others call it management by experience. Does this work?
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Two Steps to Getting Truly Useful Project Management Metrics
One of the hard steps in getting to truly useful project management metrics is to get to a point where the metric tells us something useful and we believe it.
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Project Manager Are We Really Managing Both Risk And Change?
In speaking with project managers, methodology masters and tool providers, it seems the key to successful technology adoption is to change the corporate culture.
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On-Time Successful Projects? This Year We Can
Projects that consistently complete on time? Gee, we can’t do that. No way ... What? We can?
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Project Managers Beware of Oversimplifying Your Problems
"I’m always on the lookout for ideas concerning software estimation, even as I ponder my own eternal mantra: Estimates are always wrong." Not!
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Project Managers – Check your Assumptions!
My boss told me my job was to drive down the roughly 500 defects on our current project so we can ship it. I also noticed another 500 issues in the database that were tagged as "work to be done." My boss said to ignore them.
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Senior Manager It Is OK Not To Be An Expert Which Is Why You Have A Project Manager
Now that we are getting close to the project launch, we start to get "help." We get VPs showing up. What is this all about? How can they afford to do this?
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Rooting Out And Removing The Causes Of Project Management Bad Habits
It was a simple bug, or so we thought. They said it was a NEW requirement and it needed approval because we undermine the project by adding new requirements!
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Why We Need Project Management Islands of Excellence
The island of excellence might be a project that cuts across the organization or it might be just a team. We give them the room to do things a little different.
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If The Talk Is All Bad Then There Are Great Opportunities
"We’re human, we can’t write perfect software." I knew from just hearing this that we could fix their problems. How is that possible from just these words?
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Being A Manager Is Hard But Not For The Reasons I Expected
I got into management because that was where the problems were. This would be simple, I thought, get the management right and then we could get the job done right. Boy, was I delusional.
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Beware The Moneyball Myth In Project Management
I loved the book Moneyball. It highlighted how we do too much based on habit and custom and not always on hard data about what actually works.
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Key Metrics Often Tell Us More Than Classic Project Management Tools
Some key project metrics not only provide tactical insight into how a project is going, they can also provide an overall strategic view not found elsewhere. Here are three we've used successfully.
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