project management
When there’s a freeloader on your team
According to extensive research The Gallup Organization (Washington D.C.) and Harvard Business Review have conducted over the past decade, few factors are as corrosive to employee engagement as a colleague who skates through the workweek taking advantage of the much harder work of others. What’s the cost of disengagement? Much more than any manager wants [...]
Is Scrum Master Certification Hurting Our Industry?
Having created a methodology that tightly integrates Scrum concepts, I tend to be a strong proponent of Scrum. But being a strong proponent doesn’t extend so far as to promote all the hype — I’m also a very strong believer in the value of formal education and the need for experience. After seeing the negative [...]
Boomers at the exit gates
Organizations across the globe are trying to come to grips with a new corporate  challenge; one created by millions of employees who make up the boomer generation, who are poised to leave the working world, for golf, sailing, gardening or playing with the grandkids. In some cases the departure of these senior employees will allow [...]
Fix your boss (or, reduce risk to quality using a matrix approach)
How do you ensure that one person doesn’t derail your entire project? Most of us have been there before. Maybe it’s a co-worker who doesn’t work well with the team. Maybe it’s your boss, who has to oversee every single decision even though he’s an overtasked bottleneck. Either problem poses a critical risk to your project: Delays, mistakes and rework because one person isn’t part of a streamlined effort. Learn how the situation can be improved, realizing positive gains in this habitually entrenched process.
Whiteboard as a PM tool
Sometimes we forget that some of the best tools are the simplest ones. If you had to pick just one tool for project management what would it be? I think in my case a whiteboard comes out pretty near the top, if not the top. My point is, focus on the work at hand, not [...]
Why heroes are bad
Most project leaders have been there before: The hero saves the day, yet again. Everyone is grateful because, obviously, if not for the hero the project would have crashed and burned. It seems so lucky that the team can benefit from this all-star who pulls the project out of the fire time and again. So, what exactly would we do without him (or her)?
Why projects fail 101
90% of projects do not meet time/cost/quality targets. Only 9% of large, 16% of medium and 28% of small company projects were completed on time, within budget and delivered measurable business and stakeholder benefits. [Standish Group Chaos Report, 1995] There are many reasons for such failures. As per a KPMG survey of 252 organizations, technology [...]
Exposing the enterprise to risk: Who decides what not to test?
Testing, testing, testing. In a recent article by John Parkinson (Strong Signals, CIO Insight magazine) the value of testing is raised on par with the activity of design and coding itself: Testing is becoming as necessary a profession as design and coding. Skills and experience matter. Process matters. Tools matter. Let the tests begin. Our [...]
Whole teams
An operational, successful team is more than a set of interchangeable, anonymized skill sets. Would you buy a car that had never been tested in a safety lab? Of course not, and yet the software industry, particularly the commercial industry (as compared to Military, for example) has been ploughing along without whole teams for decades–a trend that seems to be getting more and more negative attention.
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