Author: Joan Starr
Strategic travel
Has your travel budget been getting you down? Or should I say, has the absence of a travel budget been getting you down? I’ve written here about what it takes to work remotely, and I’ve been thinking lately about how to […]
Project ecology
It’s standard to describe software development and implementation projects as having “life cycles.” If you look at some of the cool new agile tools, you’ll see another paradigm: story-telling, in which a project becomes a narrative, and each task is […]
Train train train…
I’ve heard quite a few project managers say lately, “I don’t have any formal project management training,” as if to discount whatever observation they were about to make, because it was “only” based on years of experience. A mix of […]
Getting things down: the case for documentation
Half way down the Agile Manifesto (a list of the principles fundamental to agile software development), it states “Working software over comprehensive documentation.” I don’t know how many of us actually refer to the Agile Manifesto when we first get up […]
Learning from mistakes
Earlier this month we marked the 104th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake (http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/earthquakeandfire/splash.html). The anniversary brought to my mind the confluence of Mother Nature and human nature. In this event, just as with Iceland’s spectacular ash cloud(s), we are witness […]
Start from the ground up
Have you ever been asked “how long does the task list need to be?” If so, has this struck you as code for something else? When I’ve been asked this question, I’ve sometimes thought it was genuine, but just as […]
Territory folks
I’ve had a couple of reminders this week about the perceived differences between technical team members and the rest of us. I claim the dubious privilege of straddling the fence, as a former member of an IT shop myself, so […]
Practicing at communities of practice
I like the phrase “community of practice.” It captures togetherness and the idea that we are practising something. We might not have it down pat. The notion has continual appeal, too, as an approach to knowledge sharing. When you try to create a community of practice […]
Exit Stage Left
I’ve just been involved in planning the end of a project. You might even say that we killed it before it got off the ground. At the same time, I’m helping to author a service level agreement which, of course, includes […]
Taking the Creep out of Scope Creep
You’re faced with a choice: If you pick Door Number 1, you have to add 1 new feature to the service you are creating. If you pick Door Number 2, you have to add 2 new features to the service you are creating. And if you pick […]