In my talk at PNSQC, I told the story of a manager who knew that multitasking was sapping productivity, but chose to assign people to Multiple projects anyway. This manager had a bunch of different stakeholders to please –all with different interests and...
In a recent post, I described a situation where one “brilliant” person is actually reducing the overall productivity of a software team. He’s writing lots of code, but no one else can figure it out. He claims that his teammates are just too stupid,...
It seems that every few months I have a similar conversation: Someone asks me how to give feedback to a difficult person. This week the conversation was with a manager I’ll call Toni.”What is it about this person that makes it difficult for you to give him...
Jerry Weinberg sums up a discussion on what is desirable in a requirements document with this statement:The thing that I want most in a requirement (whether it’s in a document or in somebody’s head or gut, is understanding. I want to customer (goal donor...
Rachel reports on a different way to read a book based on Tony Buzan’s work. I’ve used a similar method called Charting to read articles and books. Actually, I’m not sure “reading” is the right term, because Charting feels more...
In SD PEOPLE & PROJECTS email newsletter, Amit Asaravala reports on the results of little survey on what managers do to build (or destroy trust): … respondents who said they trust their managers praised them for being honest, fair and open-minded: “I...
Over on Jerry Weinberg’s SHAPE Forum, there’s a discussion on what we’ve learned about XP over the last few years. One of the themes is that success depends on the human interaction skills of the people involved. (I guess we could say that about any...
Last week, my husband attended a mandatory session on sexual harassment at his work.Here’s one of the scenarios that came up:A woman comes to her manager complaining that she’s being harassed. A male co-worker has asked her for a date on three separate...
I spent two days last week facilitating a planning session for asoftware project. I was working with a team from a functional organization with a pretty heavy phase-gate process, and a waterfall way of building. The team was fininsh their “definition”...
It seems to me, that if you want to work with groups or teams–a software project team, for example– it helps to learn how to work with groups or teams.I attended a meeting the other day. In the front of the room was a guy with a flip chart and a marker....
