Just a Document?
Working with a couple of groups that are striving for a certificate in Project Management, we have run into an interesting situation. While the deliverables that contribute to the grading in the course focus on hard-skills implementation of a realistic, but simulated, project (most have selected to go with a PMO implementation), the one document they produce that is not directly part of the grading is turning out to be the most relevant to the success of many of the teams. It is their team agreement. Read more
Communication Chasm
I read an article from Cutter’s Agile E-mail Advisor this week that sparked my interest. In it, Jens Coldewey concluded that “rather than being an opposition to software engineering, agile development is an alternative draft of software engineering”. In the context of Jens’ article and some presentations earlier in the week at the PNSQC, here was my response. Read more
Not Rotting in Smugness
I gave a couple of presentations at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference in Portland this week: a case study about a rousing success we had with HP in Barcelona, and a presentation about what each of us as individuals can do to improve overall quality in collaborative teams. The conference uses green, yellow and red cards to allow people to rate the talk immediately, with the option of providing some written feedback. While both talks were very well received, one person responded to my ‘individuals’ talk with the following comment on a red card: “the correlation chart, the last entry about length of employment – you mean active engagement – the substitution of length of employment is why age discrimination mean I expect to lose my job – may you rot in your smugness”. Woah! Let me respond… Read more
Care and Feeding
How we decide to go about our daily lives has a significant on the outcome, both immediate and long-term. Over the years we have come up with all sort of alternatives for communicating with others, and I fear that we tend to lean towards those forms that go against the nurturing of our relationships, in the name of multi-tasking. For the most part, we are not doing our eyesight any good, either, as we spend most of our work-day (and much time outside of the office) staring at our screens. Read more
