November 2nd, 2007
I brought along an interesting book on my trip to Rome last weekend, and thought I’d recommend it to those of you who have the good luck, or bad luck (depending on your perspective) of managing geeks. The book is Leading Geeks, by Paul Glen; it’s about 250 pages of straightforward reading, and qualifies reasonably […]
October 16th, 2007
I‘ll be giving a presentation on the “top 10 software engineering concepts” at an ITMPI software best-practices seminar in Jacksonville, FL today; for more details about this and future seminars (including, for example, Albany and Austin next month), click here.
If you’d like to download a 18.4-megabyte PDF of the one-page mind-map for the presentation, click […]
October 11th, 2007
I’ll be giving a presentation on the “top 10 software engineering concepts” at a software best-practices seminar in Detroit today; for more details about this and future seminars (including, for example, Jacksonville next week, and Austin next month), click here.
If you’d like to download a 15.9-megabyte PDF of the one-page mind-map for the presentation, […]
September 5th, 2007
Back in May, I participated in a panel session at an ICSE conference in Minneapolis — before the bridge fell down, and before its airport men’s room became so notorious — in which we celebrated the 20th anniversary publication of Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister. My report on that panel session can be […]
February 15th, 2007
I’ve gotten various comments in response to the software productivity/quality metrics that I cited from Michael Mah’s presentation to the New York SPIN chapter the other night — ranging from “Of course! It just proves what I knew all along” to “Baloney! I don’t believe a word of it!” All of this reinforces one of […]
February 13th, 2007
Don’t shoot the messenger, okay? I didn’t generate these sobering statistics myself, and while there’s an underlying rationale that makes sense to me, I haven’t had a chance to personally validate them. If you want more details, you should contact Michael Mah himself; I’ll provide more details on who he is, and where he got […]
October 17th, 2006
I had the good fortune to be invited to participate in Construx’s Executive Summit conference in Seattle this week, and have just finished the first day of the conference. The highlight of the first day was the opening keynote presentation by Steve McConnell, founder of the firm, and author of a number of excellent books […]
October 4th, 2006
Yesterday, I wrote about a Computerworld article, entitled “The Ten Commandments of Project Management,” which proposed a number of “commandments” to ensure project management success. I thought it was a good start, but I’ve got an alternative list. Here it is:
Don’t fail to identify the key “players” who will ultimately declare “success” or “failure” […]
October 3rd, 2006
An interesting article showed up in Computerworld a couple days ago, entitled “The Ten Commandments of Project Management.” The author, James Kerr, suggests that “your company can position itself to enter the promised land of project-based culture” by adhering to the following commandments:
Thou shalt narrow project scope.
Thou shalt not suffer a fat team.
Thou shalt […]
