My Career I have been very fortunate in my career, and that really means very lucky. Upon graduating from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, I had two job offers after sending my resume to more than 100 companies. That is not a very good yield, but it would be good enough. I selected […]
Value, Scope and Change Requests Change requests are part of any development project. Change requests are sometimes necessary as we learn by building and doing the work. In my experience, change requests often are born from requirements we thought we understood, only to learn by working with the product or system that we really did […]
Value Business is predicated on providing value to the customer, but it does not end there. The business itself needs to see value in the work, so this is really a value chain that is only as strong as the weakest link. If the value to the customer is too low or not existing, no […]
The team My first job out of university was with a small product development and manufacturing company. The company developed their own embedded products for sale all over the world. I do not know how this collection of technicians and engineers ended up as a tight or as close when it came to work. The group […]
Queuing Theory Queuing theory is the study of waiting lines and is associated with business in determining resources needed to achieve service business throughput objectives, but it does not just apply to services and material handling. Queuing Theory and Billable Hours I have worked at companies that had a target for billable hours, that well […]
Poor Process or Poor Execution I have used both conventional approaches to projects, as well as agile. In fact, i have used some of the agile techniques in conventional projects with success. I know, anecdotal but perhaps an interesting anecdote. Conventional projects have had considerable high failure reported (Standish Group Studies for example). The problem […]
Variation! Though sometimes we may refuse to recognize it, the world is a full of variation, even in the things we think or believe are constant. For example, my wife has been known to say, “you always do…” or “you never do…”, to which I retort, I am human and I am not that repeatable. […]
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 […]
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 […]