A Short Collection of Random Links
It's the end of the fiscal year, and that brings project deadlines, holidays and vacations, performance reviews, and all sorts of tasks that fill up the days, evenings, and weekends. I am remiss in posting for a bit, so I'll pick off a few items that I've been saving in my blogroll ...
- Don't Worry, We'll Fix It! There are plenty of places to find war stories from the tech front out there on the web, but Papadimoulis' site is a cut above the rest - primarily because the tales are so well written. This one made me laugh out loud at the punch line, which is a rare event. Scanning the feed is usually enough, but the follow-on comments on this site can be just as amusing.
- Ten Things to Learn This School Year: An entry from last Fall on Kawasaki's always excellent blog, this one is full of pointers that I wish more folks in the current business world would read. The best of the best ...
- How to talk to your boss ... Your role is to provide answers, not questions ...
- How to run a meeting ... the primary purpose of a business meeting is to make a decision ... not to share experiences or feel warm and fuzzy ...
- How to figure out anything on your own ... force yourself to learn how ... there are no office hours, no teaching assistants, and study groups in the real world ...
- How to explain something in thirty seconds ... at the end of your thirty-second spiel, there should be an obvious answer to the question, “So what?"
- In Defense of Difficult Clients: This article is a nice little drop of wisdom amidst the ocean of web design brilliance at A List Apart. It takes a strong faith to withstand questioning, and if you can't test your closely held beliefs every once in awhile, the "difficult clients" will gladly help.
- Consistency or personality? Many moons ago, I was in a room full of pharmaceutical marketing folks, who were stunned when I announced that McDonalds represents the textbook definition of "quality". A predominantly North Shore (Chicago) crowd, they were amused and aghast, but they hadn't been exposed to Deming, quality circles and ISO-9000. The trick, of course, is that a customer-attuned quality circle will guide it's incremental quantitiative improvements towards the customers' needs and wants, and that will typically lead towards the qualitative improvements that most folks think of when they think ... "quality".
- Pete's Estimating Laws: These are clearly tongue-in-cheek, but might be good to share with those on your project team that are non-PMs, or short on experience. More best-of-the-best:
- Software Engineers are always optimistic (generally REALLY optimistic)
- Don’t let yourself be bullied into committing to something you cannot achieve
- Most people’s estimating skills improve with experience; some don’t
- Look up the word “estimate” in the dictionary. You may find it useful in a meeting
- Schedules are (almost) always wrong
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posted by James P. MacLennan at 10:36 PM
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