I would like to start off with has anybody seen an appropriate study of estimating when it comes to doing the work? Not a study that already knows the conclusion they want, but an actual scientific study. The thoughts below are not based upon anything like that but, having seen many estimating boondoggles. I have […]
Clues! Signals! Below is the result of a collaboration with John Cutler. He posted a document on Google Docs, and I liked the outline so much I felt compelled to post my thoughts In fact, it was surreal adding my contents to the Google docs and John coincidentally showed up on line, at the same […]
Team Building Phases Teams are not as easy as throw our collection of individuals into a room together and bang, thus is a team created. We are fond of the description of the steps a team will go through by Bruce Tuckman we list below. Our experience suggests this list to be a reasonable list of the […]
Project Management and Critical Thinking There are a good many cognitive biases that can impact discerning the truth or what is valid and true. Yet knowing what is valid and true is important for any business decision, product development and especially for project managers. Project managers are often part of decision arm and execution arm […]
I had a brief chat with Tom Cagley of the famous SPaMcast the other night about teams. We periodically take time to talk about product development topics, and I frequently appear on SPaMCast podcasts. Last night we talked about teams an whatever magic makes a collection of individuals move to the point of performing better than the […]
Are we starting to believe and behave as if all conflict is bad? Not just bad, but something to be avoided at all costs. There are upsides to conflict, that we may be forgetting. For example, the tension between what I wanted to be able to do with my life outside of employment at the time, […]
Risk Management Through the Project In modern life, risk management is a fundamental discipline for success. This does not just apply to work life, or project management but also personal life. Today we are going to discuss the approaches and impacts on the project when there is insufficient attention to the risks to which the […]
I have been in twitter and real discussions about safe spaces for the product development team to do their work. I can understand this, nobody should get hurt at work, that is one of the reasons for OSHA, and internal work instructions and equipment. However, we are not talking about the physical world in our modern […]
I recently spoke at a PMI Chapter in Ballantyne event, well, I say spoke at but we really played a game of planning poker. We divided the group up into groups of four (that is how many suits per deck). There were 5 groups, and I supplied the prompt from which all responses were generated. As expected,the initial prompt produced […]
I have been dabbling once again with bowing. I did this when I was a kid with my family. I bowled on a league from time to time as well. Then you graduate, get a job, wife, and child, and you sort of just stop plying for whatever reason. As I restart my bowling endeavor, […]