Project management is a dirty job. It is all responsibility and tracking and taking the blame without the creative input and true control required for success. OK, maybe I'm being a little hard here. But too often I see project managers that get hit from all sides without the real authority to control what is going on with the project. Why is that? I wonder if you asked 10 people, would they come up with the same description of what a project manager is and does? More importantly, how do they interact with a project manager.
There's the Project Management Institute, with its standards, and that's great. On the day to day efforts, though, you have layered different methodologies, ideologies and disciplines in different departments that all come together for a single project. Can one person manage all that? In fact, how does one define a project? Who defines a project? And the fatal, "who owns this project?" For a project manager to be successful, the project manager must be entrusted with true authority. In return, the project manager must commit to a professional level of knowledge of what it takes to run a good project. That will bring job satisfaction to the hardest hit project manager.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Sunday, February 3, 2008
About buffalo chicken cream cheese
There's a wonderful cafe that I go to after my morning walk. In addition to a large variety of coffees, they have healthy snacks. Recently, a couple have surfaced that triggered the Quality gene in me.
Now, what would you think if you saw buffalo chicken flavored cream cheese? I'll tell you what I thought -- the whole point of the cream cheese is to cut the bite of the spicy chicken flavor. If you mix the two together you defeated the purpose.
Not to be outdone, the healthy cookies I bought market themselves as reminding you of the taste of lemon squares or lemon meringue pie. But they make the same mistake. The flavor that is so nice is the balance between the meringue, the crust and the lemon all sitting separately in your mouth. If you mix them all together in the cookie, the flavor is changed.
Now, I know this is a blog about Quality Software, so how is food relevant? The lesson in my morning coffee break is to remember the purpose of the components. When you are developing requirements for a new product, consider how the items balance each other. Relational databases and object oriented development, for example, were meant to decouple components that were hard to reach without going through a number of steps to get there. But human nature being what it is, we are still seeing products where you have to do any number of things before you get to what you want. Or they put too many fields on the screen, before I have all the information for each of those fields. The latter is particularly true of defect tracking systems and check ins for source code control software.
I'd like my cream cheese after my buffalo chicken, thank you.
Now, what would you think if you saw buffalo chicken flavored cream cheese? I'll tell you what I thought -- the whole point of the cream cheese is to cut the bite of the spicy chicken flavor. If you mix the two together you defeated the purpose.
Not to be outdone, the healthy cookies I bought market themselves as reminding you of the taste of lemon squares or lemon meringue pie. But they make the same mistake. The flavor that is so nice is the balance between the meringue, the crust and the lemon all sitting separately in your mouth. If you mix them all together in the cookie, the flavor is changed.
Now, I know this is a blog about Quality Software, so how is food relevant? The lesson in my morning coffee break is to remember the purpose of the components. When you are developing requirements for a new product, consider how the items balance each other. Relational databases and object oriented development, for example, were meant to decouple components that were hard to reach without going through a number of steps to get there. But human nature being what it is, we are still seeing products where you have to do any number of things before you get to what you want. Or they put too many fields on the screen, before I have all the information for each of those fields. The latter is particularly true of defect tracking systems and check ins for source code control software.
I'd like my cream cheese after my buffalo chicken, thank you.
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