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Posts from Project Management

Project Management excellence covers three tiers:

Expertise in the discipline. It is about knowing, adjusting, and creating tools for the PM tool kit as required. The basics and details are managed carefully, controlled, and shared with the team.
Consulting and Leading. Beyond the tactical nature of project management, success requires active listening and communicating, understanding and addressing business needs, inspiring a project team, breaking barriers, and building relationships.
Value Add. Where do you add value? Design? New technology? Success is adding the additional expertise to the experience. Where is your passion? Share that passion with the team, the client, and the company.

August 11

Shuttleworth on Project Management

Mark Shuttleworth, of Thawte fortune and Ubuntu fame, has some (IMHO) neat ideas on how to manage software development efforts that may be interesting to spend a few human processing cycles considering.

http://lwn.net/Articles/292031

Despite the article being written for Free Software and Linux, I think it’s incredibly relevant to all development efforts - read it as if he’s talking about Molecular projects, and not Linux distributions.

Here are two key paragraphs:

One of the key requirements that Shuttleworth sees is the need to “keep the trunk pristine”, by doing integration on the trunk and feature development on branches. Along with this is the need for more and better tests. While not necessarily believing in test-driven development, he certainly leans that way. In any case, all the tests should pass before committing to the trunk.

Many projects do not yet have an extensive test suite, but this needs to change. He quoted a Chinese proverb that “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is today”. He mentioned that he is working on a robot that controls the trunk of a development tree. Developers will request it to merge from a branch, so the robot merges the branch and runs all the tests. If the tests pass, it commits, otherwise it gets kicked back to the developer.

This approach sounds pretty good to me.

posted to: Project Management, Technology | 4 Comments »

May 1

QA Process Design

by Camila Carvalho

This month I have been interviewing some of our colleagues and researching tools for a bug tracking system to be adopted as our standard. What became salient is that the tools are important but irrelevant if we don’t have the necessary processes and disciplines to support it.

Coincidentally this week I was reading the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge newsletter and came across a very interesting article, which made me think about the other incredible important factor on this equation: human resources! We can have the best tools, the best processes and methodologies, but finding testers is still very challenging, and that is because people are challenged by novelty and can’t stand doing the same task over and over again. It is common knowledge that after a while testers get burned out and start making mistakes.

According to the article – summary and link below - a Danish company found the perfect fit for the function. It employs people with a form of autism, that have the characteristics needed for the testing process: high intelligence, precision-oriented skills, deep concentration, and patience to be checking and rechecking outcomes, documenting test plans, and maintaining follow-through.

I think one of the lessons here is that when thinking about QA we need to think about documentation, stress the need of having very detailed test plans to be able to rotate testers and to outsource parts of the process.

Executive Summary:

Software analysts and programmers live to innovate—but hate to run tests. Yet top-notch testing saves many a company money when bugs are caught early. A new case coauthored by HBS professor Robert D. Austin describes the secret behind a Danish consultancy’s success: The majority of its testers have Asperger syndrome or a form of autism spectrum disorder. Key concepts include:

Techies tend to be idiosyncratically talented. The case “Specialisterne: Sense & Details” is about putting diverse talent where it will be most effective.
Software testing requires superb powers of concentration combined with tolerance (even preference) for routine tasks.
Seventy-five percent of the software consultants in the Specialisterne case have Asperger syndrome or some form of autism spectrum disorder.
Some software testing may be offshored, but mission-critical testing must be done near the client.

For the whole article: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5869.html

posted to: Content Management, Project Management | No Comments »

April 18

What is the Secret to Project Management?

by Peter Marci

As the director of the project management discipline for a leading Interactive Agency, I interview quite a few people. A standard question I ask during a typical first interview is “What do you feel is the secret to project management, in other words, what separates good project managers from great project managers?” It is a pretty open-ended question and there is no right answer but it is a great question to gain better insight into the depth of the candidate. The most common answer I get is “communication, making sure everyone knows what is going on”. While this is not incorrect, I think there is a much deeper and truth-seeking answer beyond this stock response. My answer to this question “emotional intelligence”. In his book, “Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers”, Anthony Mersino, PMP states the following:

“PMP certification does not in itself make a PM more capable; it simply proves that you have the requisite project management experience and can pass the multiple-choice certification exam. To be truly effective you need to be able to implement projects and work well with your team. Emotional intelligence will help you do that”

I could not agree more. The concept of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) was first popularized by Daniel Goleman in 1995 with his book, “Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ”. In his follow-up book in 1998 entitled “Working with Emotional Intelligence” Goleman presents an Emotional Intelligence framework for the workplace. Similarly, Mersino presents an Emotional Intelligence framework specific to project management. Both frameworks include a subject I would like to discuss and describe in greater detail. That topic is empathy.

(more…)

posted to: Industry Trends, Project Management | 3 Comments »