I recently attended two seminars at the ICE 2006 Technology Conference in Edmonton thanks to my employer CGI. I enjoyed both presentations and regret not attending more. I was able to pull some useful tips and ideas from each seminar that resonated with me. The first session was Lessons for Risk Management Taken from the [...]
Posts in category 'management'
I have recently experienced two episodes of ‘crunch mode’ – the flurry of activity prior to deploying new functionality into production. The crunch happens because there is insufficient time to do everything that needs to be done. To compensate, people work longer or take shortcuts like skipping thorough testing. The result is often a higher [...]
My article on Understanding Project Schedules discussed four factors of project schedules: time, resources, scope, and quality. Time is often the factor of greatest interest to project stakeholders such as customers or management. They often ask when the project will be finished. I refer to this as elapsed time – the passage of days on [...]
Project schedules are obviously important for project managers and team leads. They are often asked questions like “When will this project be finished?”, with a typical follow-up question of “Can it be done sooner?”. So one key responsibility of project managers is to create and maintain the project schedule. Does this mean that software developers [...]
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This is a software organizational / project management pattern that I have come across many times but never seen written, so here it is. Context: You are managing a team (four or more people). The primary goal of your team is to develop new software functionality (either by creating a new product or enhancing an [...]
I recently read the book Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency. My previous post on Working Smarter, Not Harder already discussed the main premise of the book. However, DeMarco writes compelling arguments on other issues, one of which is overtime. Much analysis has been done to determine the correlation between [...]
