In many companies and industries there has been a trend to combine “management” roles in an effort to reduce costs or improve efficiency. Personally, I first noticed this trend with combining project management and functional management roles. The reasoning is that any competent manager should be able to handle the project management duties for their […]

Who owns quality for your product? Whenever I ask that question, I am often met with one or more of the following reactions: A blank stare “Testing/Quality Assurance/Quality Control, of course!” “Management.” (lots of variations on that) “Creative/technical leadership.” So, maybe the better question is: Who defines quality?

At some point in every project something will go wrong. A component doesn’t work. A supplier fails. A key team member quits. The design doesn’t work. The client drops the project. The team goes into crisis mode, upset at the situation and running in multiple directions to fix it. Once you understand the anatomy of […]

Does this seem familiar? Months before a deadline, the team is relaxed and responds to problems with: “Don’t worry!  We’ve got months to deal with that!”  As months turn into weeks, issues get addressed along the way, but some of the really hard problems continue to hang around. Finally, when the deadline is days away, […]

The following comment was submitted on one of my blog articles. It’s quite a rant about Agile, so I thought it was worth addressing as a full post. Agile is not always implemented in a good way or at the point in the life of an application/product where it can be useful and not disruptive. […]

A real conversation I had two weeks ago: Executive: “What project management method do you use?  Please don’t tell me it’s Scrum.” Me: “Actually, we are Agile and use Scrum.” Executive: “Oh, no! I have seen so many Scrum projects go bad!” Other Executive: “Well, this is more of a hybrid project…” Me: “We could […]