July 14th, 2010
The longer I work in the IT industry, the more amazed I am at the type of mistakes that project managers make, and also the way they react to them — both at the time the mistake is committed, and when they talk about it weeks, months, or even years later.
I have a somewhat [...]
July 12th, 2010
When a project manager “sinner” sits down to talk with his or her IT “confessor-priest,” one of two situations usually exists: either the sin has already been committed — i.e., the project manager has already made a mistake — or it has not. We’ll discuss these two situations in separate blog postings.
Assuming that the conversation [...]
July 11th, 2010
Imagine that I’m the “confessor priest” in an IT project confessional environment, and a troubled project manager walks into my office, and tells me that in a fit of rage, he has just shot an obnoxious, uncooperative, unproductive members of his project team — point blank, right between the eyes. What should I do?
Or consider [...]
July 9th, 2010
What would a priest do if he sat alone in his confessional box all day long, and nobody showed up to confess his sins? Perhaps he would just shrug, and come back again the next day. But eventually, he would … well, I’ll let someone who knows more about the protocol and procedures of organized [...]
July 7th, 2010
Yesterday, I introduced the concept of a “project confessional,” where troubled IT project managers could confess their “sins” and ask for help.
Before we delve into the more subtle issues associated with such a confessional, I want to cover the basics … and before I do that, I want to acknowledge that this is not some [...]
July 6th, 2010
Imagine that you’re an IT project manager, and that you’ve just discovered you’ve made a terrible decision. It wasn’t deliberate, and perhaps it wasn’t even conscious; maybe it was a momentary outburst at an uncooperative programmer, caused by all the pressure and exhaustion from overtime. But now your uncooperative programmer has quit in a huff, [...]
June 1st, 2010
The last several postings in this thread about the future of technology have focused on the consequences of hardware advances — e.g., all of the marvelous things we can look forward to in the next 5-10 years as a result of computers/chips that are 10-100 times cheaper, faster, smaller, etc.
But as an intellectual exercise, suppose [...]
May 3rd, 2010
I’m giving a presentation on “Learning to Love Software Maintenance” at the Software Best Practices Conference sponsored by the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute in beautiful downtown Trenton, NJ on May 4, 2010. You should be there so you can meet and hear some of the other great speakers at the conference, as well as whatever clever jokes may [...]
March 16th, 2010
I’m giving a one-hour presentation Tues evening (Mar 16th) on “Death March Projects in Today’s Hard Times,” at the regular monthly meeting of Boston’s Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) chapter. It will take place in one of the buildings of MITRE’s campus in Bedford, MA, somewhere in the vast wilderness north of Route 128. You [...]
November 30th, 2009
I’m here in Rome this week, presenting a two-day seminar on “Managing Death-March Projects” for Technology Transfer Institute. You should be there so you can hear whatever clever jokes may occur to me while I’m presenting my material, as well as the comments and questions from the other participants. But if you’re stuck in some [...]
