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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January 19, 2012 Bruce Benson
Change Management
Should we simply follow the crowd until we found something that suggests another course of action?
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January 17, 2012 Bruce Benson
Planning
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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January 11, 2012 Bruce Benson
Process Improvement
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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January 9, 2012 Bruce Benson
Metrics
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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January 5, 2012 Bruce Benson
Change Management, Risk Management
Projects that consistently complete on time? Gee, we can’t do that. No way ... What? We can?
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January 3, 2012 Bruce Benson
Change Management
"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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December 16, 2011 Bruce Benson
Planning
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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December 14, 2011 Bruce Benson
Metrics
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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December 12, 2011 Bruce Benson
Leadership
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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December 8, 2011 Bruce Benson
Management
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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December 6, 2011 Bruce Benson
Change Management
"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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December 2, 2011 Bruce Benson
Change Management
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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November 30, 2011 Bruce Benson
Leadership
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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November 28, 2011 Bruce Benson
Change Management
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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November 21, 2011 Bruce Benson
Metrics
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