Over the last few weeks I have overheard a couple of things that really tickled me, because of their brutal portrayal of some business truism, and because of the skill of the speaker in articulating:
R.A.T.S. Delegation
In writing a recent post for my other blog about planning and delegation, I fell into a set of 4 principles that define how to delegate successfully. The principles are Responsibility, Accountability, Trust, Success or RATS. Here is the excerpt from that post: But in reality, delegation in leadership is not about getting other…
Software Engineering
I am not a fan of software methodologies, third party libraries, hyper-generalized frameworks or other so called productivity enhancers within the software development process. At the same time, I abhor the idea of a thousand developers at a thousand keyboards creating a thousand screens, features, pages and trying somehow to stitch them together into a…
Starting Green
One of the most useless project management conventions I have ever worked with is the status stoplight or RAG status. From a simplicity perspective, it is designed to convey a general state of the project. Green means things are “OK”. Amber means things aren’t that OK. Red means things are not OK at all. The…
When Task Estimates Fail
Of course, the only valid reason for estimation is prediction. We want to predict the cost and duration of delivery for some set of working software capabilities. If we didn’t care about time and cost, we wouldn’t waste our time trying to predict. We realize that software task estimates alone are insufficient for this prediction.…
Fail Fast Furiously
The other day, I read a tweet by @gnat (nat torkington), saying that fail fast as a mantra was misleading – because the objective was to learn, not to fail. Actually when I exhort people to fail fast, the objective is to retire a risk. Sure, learning is important, but what is really important to…
Weaponized Metrics
Software teams hate metrics. They don’t like to estimate work. They don’t like to tell you how much progress they have made. I remember my first “team” project. PM asked me to estimate how long it would take me to finish a task I had never done before on a platform I was new to.…
Project Portfolio Management
Projects are not assets, they are liabilities. Like a future obligation, or a goal. When you manage a portfolio of liabilities, they have to be offset by assets. The process of project portfolio management is simply the management of flow of expenditure projected by each project, in time, compared with the projected flow of funding…
Product Management
Product Management is something that should be easy to understand. The highest level goals of product management should be easy to articulate. 1) build a valuable product 2) maintain the value of a product relative to its customer community 3) manage the investment in the product, to ensure the best possible return
When Firing Is Better
Sometimes it would just be easier, and better for all parties if we were honest and just “Fired their sorry asses!” It would be easier for management, because there is less corporate drama around firing and hiring than around a reorg, or implementing alternative staffing models, and RIF’s are either good (when the economy is…