Posts Tagged: urgency

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9
Feb 11

Focus

Hoarce Dediu; Why focusing on a few products is hard:

But “focus” is the willful rejection of this theory. By saying no to alternatives you increase risk disproportionally to the reward. If you have the means to maintain a portfolio it certainly seems imprudent not to do so.

So why would someone want to focus?

The answer is that too much diversification is dangerous. It’s dilutive to everything the company uses to create value: its resources, its processes and its priorities. It dulls the mind and tarnishes the brand.

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26
Oct 10

Estimation anti-patterns

Liz Keogh writes about Estimation anti-patterns. My favorite one:

Presenter: How tall am I?
Crowd:5′8″! 5′9″! 2 metres!
Presenter: Go on, you can manage more than that. How tall am I?
Crowd: 6′2″?
Presenter: Come on! You can do better than that! HOW TALL AM I?
Crowd: (Giggles nervously.)
Presenter: Just because a project manager tells you you can do more, it doesn’t make it true.

If you’ve ever felt burned by an estimate, you’ll enjoy the levity.

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16
Oct 10

Things take the time they take

In an interview with Jerry Weinberg:

“Things take the time they take, not the time you hope they will take. Pushing for half-time produces half-baked.”

I absolutely agree! When you push for a project to complete faster, something has to give. And more often than not, it is the quality that suffers because that’s the easiest cutback to hide in the short term.

Jerry is an author of more than 40 books, including “The Psychology of Computer Programming” and “Introduction to General Systems Thinking” and was the Manager of Operating Systems Development in the Project Mercury (1959–1963), which aimed to put a human in orbit around the Earth. (Thank you Wikipedia!)

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24
Jul 10

Fairly Good Estimators

Johanna Rothman in Maintaining Project Agility has a positive take on the skill of estimating:

“In my experience, most engineers with more than five years of experience are actually fairly good estimators, they just can’t estimate the amount of weekly bureaucracy they have to deal with.”

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15
Mar 10

Time Poverty and the Cult of Busy

Scott Berkun (author of The Myths of Innovation)  writes:

“[...] What people really mean when they say “I don’t have time” is this thing is not important enough to earn my time. It’s a polite way to tell people they’re not worth your time.

This means people who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for  everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.”

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