His blog is devoted to project management and he has original ideas about how to manage people. I think he believes that we lack some thinking and understanding for the others and this is why I feel his blog so close to my blogs PM Stories and Stop and Think!. And probably this is the reason why I like his blog so much.

Read the interview here. You may find some food for thought.

If you like the posts in this blog or you are interested in the discussed topics, please, subscribe to the RSS feed to guarantee yourself that you won’t miss an interesting post. You can do it in an RSS reader or by Email.

You may also find these posts interesting:

• Top-down Planning – Good or Bad?
• Walking on Water
• The Most Important Rules of Delegation
• Project Management and Hiking
• The Recommended Weekly Readings (2007-08-18). Project Management

The magazine is devoted to the quality assurance in the software development field and has the ambition to present some of the best authors in that area. I am really proud to be one of them! The articles are very good and Quality Matters raises the bar very high with its first issue. I wish the publishers faith and devotion to keep it valuable and useful. I hope that I will have again the opportunity to write for the magazine in the future.

Don’t miss it!

If you like the posts in this blog or you are interested in the discussed topics, please, subscribe to the RSS feed to guarantee yourself that you won’t miss an interesting post. You can do it in an RSS reader or by Email.

You may also find these posts interesting:

• Software For Code Reviews For Only $5! A 5-Day Offer

I started thinking and looking for some more blog posts on delegation and I came to some conclusions which I would like to share here with you.

Delegation is a two-way street, says Richard Lannon. Yes, this is an important thing that we shouldn’t forget. And when we assign a task to someone and we hold them responsible for it we have to have in mind our reasons to delegate and their reasons to accept it.

What are the issues from our perspective? There are two major questions we must ask ourselves: Why to delegate? and What to delegate?

The most common reason we refrain from delegating is our streak of perfectionism – we think we can do it better or faster than the others or we just don’t trust them. Krishna Kumar has a great post on the reasons of our distrust towards our team and how can we overwhelm them. Penelope Trunk says that our ability to do things perfectly isn’t as highly valued as we think it is. In fact, perfectionism isn’t valuable in 80 percent of the work we do and it is so unhealthy that it’s a risk factor for depression. We have to learn to let go. We can’t control everything so we must trust the people in our team.

Another common mistake is to outsource the most unpleasant and dirty work to the others. Penelope Trunk says that if you don’t do any of the crap work, your team will think you do nothing and you won’t be accepted as a part of the team. You must keep for youself only those tasks that are your specialty and to delegate all the other tasks to the people who can do them best.

On the other hand, you should put yourself in your team members’ shoes. They always ask themselves “What’s in it for me?”. Penelope says:

“Important work” means that it helps someone meet their own goals. So you should delegate to people not based on what is important to you, but what is important to them.

And more:

Your job is to help make people stars. Management is essentially an act of constant giving and constant patience. It entails giving people a little attention all the time instead of giving them lots of attention only when they mess up. In fact, if you’re managing people effectively they don’t mess up, because you play to their strengths and teach them how to move around their weaknesses.

People want to grow. and the most effective way of learning is by doing things. When you delegate your team members tasks, when you hold them responsible for those tasks fulfillment, they will learn a lot even if they make some mistakes.

The number-one factor in job happiness for young people is training. If they think they’re learning a lot on the job, they’ll like the job. You need to constantly coach these employees and teach them new skills and ideas. If you don’t, you won’t be able to lead them.

Perfectly said. Now that’s what is most important in delegation.

If you like the posts in this blog or you are interested in the discussed topics, please, subscribe to the RSS feed to guarantee yourself that you won’t miss an interesting post. You can do it in an RSS reader or by Email

You may also find these posts interesting:

• Krishna Kumar Did An Interview With Me On Software Development
• The 15 Commandments of the True Leader
• The Recommended Weekly Readings (2007-08-18). Project Management
• The 20 Qualities of the Inspirational Leader

Rich has created his own blog recently and there you can learn more about his book-writing experiment as well as about crowdsourcing. He also wrote a post in PM Hut where you can learn more about the relationship between crowdsourcing and project management.

I found the idea of crowdsourcing intriguing and I followed some of the links he recommended. So I got into the site of Cambrian House – the home of crowdsourcing. This is a very interesting place where people share their ideas and get help and advices from the others. I am not sure if it can really bring good results as it sounds pretty much like the OpenSource idea and I am not very fond of OpenSource but I will give it a try for a little longer before I make some conclusions. You can try it by yourself – the registration is free!

Rich’s blog is called Scope Crêpe, which sounds just like scope creep – the worst project manager’s nightmare – and was intended to be funny. I put his blog immediately in my RSS reader – there are a lot of things we can learn from Rich Maltzman and with such sense of humor I believe his blog could never be boring.

Good luck Rich! I wish you a lot of grateful readers!

If you like the posts in this blog or you are interested in the discussed topics, please, subscribe to the RSS feed to guarantee yourself that you won’t miss an interesting post. You can do it in an RSS reader or by Email

You may also find these posts interesting:

• What Kind Of Programmer Are You?
• Krishna Kumar Did An Interview With Me On Software Development
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You can download the book from its website – The Software Conspiracy.

Glenn Alleman of Herding Cats points our attention to the Department of Defense version of the Guide to Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). It is a better source of knowledge he says and more than this – it is free. In fact it is called “DoD Extension to PMBOK® Guide” and as they say in the preface:

The primary purpose of this document is to identify and describe defense applications of the core project management knowledge areas contained in the PMBOK® Guide, as well as those defense-intensive knowledge areas not contained in the Guide. It is important to understand that this is an extension to the PMBOK® Guide, and is not intended to be a stand-alone document.

Anyway, the document is free to download and I believe it could be useful source of knowledge to the practicing project managers.

And, at the end, a free e-book from one of the greatest software gurus – Ed Yourdon. His book Death March is still in my personal Top 10 list of all time influencing books on software development.

Craig Brown of Better Projects brought the link to the free e-book Just Enough Structured Analysis to my attention. He says:

[Yourdon] over time has migrated from a view that highly structured processes will improve project results to one where he believes the success factors are quality people and in keeping bureaucracy out of the way.

Ed Yourdon is a world class expert on software development and the book is definitely worth reading. He says in the Introduction:

This book is intended for two audiences: first, the person who is new to the field of systems analysis, and, second, the experienced systems analyst who needs to acquaint himself with systems modeling tools and techniques that have evolved over the past decade.

Happy reading!

You may also find these posts interesting:

• Top-down Planning – Good or Bad?
• How do you estimate the project’s budget? A new poll
• Recommended Readings: Project Risk Management
• Programmer’s Day
• How would you reward your employees – cash or gift?

I thought a long time before deciding to write something about it.

Why is it so difficult for me to write about successful products? Well, mostly because I spent most of my professional life working at project-oriented companies. Most of the projects I participated in were one-time shots and I don’t know what happened to those products – if they were ever used or if they were successful. And I can say that most of the companies operating in Bulgaria are outsourcing companies working this way. It is not their responsibility to care about the product. They only care about the current project – to be delivered on time, within the budget and within the defined scope.

I have also worked in some product-oriented companies but they were so small and so poorly managed that most of them soon bankrupted. I know about only one of them which still functions.

So it was a really big challenge to think of some example of a successful product and one of the most important questions I asked myself was “What is the definition of a successful product?” I think the only answer to this question should be “a product that makes the customer’s life easier and is used for a long time”. So, I finally decided to tell you about one of my experimental works with my own company. It is a “successful product” because it was developed almost ten years ago and is still in use and is of great help to the people who work with it.

The story started in the beginning of 1998. There was a need of a software product that calculates the debt of some companies that had taken a loan from a government agency. The problem was that the rules of calculating the interests were very complex and it was not easy to be done with common tools like a calculator or even a spreadsheet. So I wrote the program. Well, I didn’t do it alone – I had a small team of partners who comprised the development team over the years.

At the beginning it was a simple program, then the customer added more functionality, then it was branched into several product for the needs of different kinds of users, and so on. I managed all the changes to happen as different projects so I didn’t suffer a scope creep. On the contrary – it was a perfect example of well-developed developer-customer relationship.

These days a major change happened – the customer decided that a serious change in the algorithms is needed and having in mind the age of the initial product we decided that we should develop a new version using a new technology and a new architecture. So we started a new project and I am currently working on it. It is close to completion and the users are already using its beta version and are very happy because they have a good tool that helps them significantly improve their performance and saves them a lot of time.

Why it turned to be such a success? Well, I think it’s primarily because I paid a lot of attention to my customer’s worries. I was very patient to listen to them although it sometimes wasted a lot of my time but they build their trust on me and once they knew that I was the only person who understands their business they started to consider me not as a servant but as a partner and as a friend. I never had problems with sign-offs and with payments and for me the only explanation for this is the trust we build in each other. We always thought that this relationship is a win-win kind of relationship and that notion made it possible to conduct all our projects successfully and finally to get a successful product.

Unfortunately, this one of the very few examples I have of successful products. In many other cases we delivered the product to the customer and then closed the relationship with them. Building a long-term relationship based on trust and accountability is a very difficult thing and few companies succeed in that but only they later become the market leaders. I think this is the only way to succeed in the business.

I don’t want to tag other people. I read some people’s blogs on software project management but Craig has already tagged them. So I would like to invite anyone who reads my blog and has a good story of a successful software product to share it in his or her blog and to link it to this post and to Craig’s post. Good success stories are much fewer than the examples of failure so it is important for us all to know them. Just to improve our belief that success is possible – you just have to think about it!

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• Classic Mistakes Forever!
• Classic Mistakes – GigaLease Case Study, Part 2
• A "Classic" Story of Classic Mistakes by Steve McConnell
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• My First Article In Quality Matters Magazine

Although it’s not a software project, it’s a great example for all of us how many things we should think about and should take in consideration when making our plans and estimates. And it is always better to do this analysis in the beginning of our project instead of doing it at the end.

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror wrote an article called Steve McConnell in the Doghouse where he shares his thoughts on McConnell’s fort-building experiment, which you can also find interesting. His main point is: One size doesn’t fit all and No two projects are the same. So you should always consider the uniqueness of each project you undertake and make your estimates very carefully.

You may also find these posts interesting:

• Classic Mistakes 2008
• Classic Mistakes – GigaLease Case Study, Part 2
• Classic Mistakes – GigaLease Case Study, Part 1
• Classic Mistakes Forever!
• Top 10 Mistakes in Software Development, According to InfoWorld Tech Watch

The problem with risk management is the negative image of the word “risk”. [...] The tendency of most stakeholders is to jump very stressfully at the statement “this is a risk”. Therefore most of the time it’s not very easy to discuss about risks, because that’s always a conversation about problems. It’s very important the risk is not perceived as a bad thing, but as a positive attitude to make sure everyone will become a winner in the end.

Remember, risk management helps you being aware of the goals you have to achieve, and what can happen if you don’t satisfy the goals. It supports you in making the right choices!

So, have no fear of risks! In order to help you and to give you courage and self-confidence today’s recommended reading are devoted to the project risk management.

• Craig Brown of Better Projects wrote a huge series of 15 posts on project risk management. It covers almost every aspect of the risk management and it’s a great place to start learning and practicing good techniques to manage your project’s risks.
• PM Hut is another great source of high-quality knowledge about project management and there you can also find a lot of very helpful articles on risk management. I highly recommend you Creating Risk Profile Graphs by Mike Griffiths of LeadingAnswers, Project Risk Management – It’s Either Contingency Planning Now or Emergency Relief Later by Christoper J. Wright, and No Risk of Defects! Making Quality-Related Risks Actionable by Alan Koch.
• And at the end – another useful post from Bas de Baar of Project Shrink – Project Risk Checklist. The checklist is an extremely helpful tool which you can use in every project you undertake and the one Bas suggests is a very good starting point of your risk management proficiency.

Happy reading!

You may also find these posts interesting:

• Techniques for Gathering Requirements
• Funny Computer Quotes
• How Can a PM Become a Real Leader?
• Krishna Kumar Did An Interview With Me On Software Development
• The Pros and Cons of Distributed Teams

Unfortunately, it isn’t funny at all. My back is aching terribly and now I know the main reason for that – my bent working pose. So I did a little research and I am giving you some links to sites with very useful information about computer ergonomics and a lot of graphics and pictures.

Here they are:

• Guide to Setting Up an Ergonomic Computer Station
• One more article on Computer Ergonomics
• And a whole blog devoted to ergonomics – Ergoblog

I believe this information will be of great help to you. Don’t be careless to your heath – think about it!

You may also find these posts interesting:

• The Recommended Weekly Readings (2007-08-18). Project Management
• How To Motivate Your Team?
• Classic Mistakes Forever!
• The 20 Qualities of the Inspirational Leader
• Techniques for Gathering Requirements

One of the richest and most valuable resources in the subject of Project Management is GanttHead. I highly recommend you to become members of this site and to subscribe to their newsletter. In relation to my recent posts about leadership (How a PM Can Become a Real Leader and The 20 Qualities of the Inspirational Leader) I found Andy Jordan’s article Project Manager vs. Project Leader where he argues that no matter how qualified in the area of task management a PM is they must have leadership skills. “PMs have a responsibility to manage their teams – even in a matrix organization – and that means being a leader”. Later on he describes the different sides of the leadership, the easy and the hard parts of being a project leader.

Another great article you can find on GanttHead is Tom L. Barnett’s Leadership-Powered Project Management. He says that all the leaders we know from history, no matter whether they were political, military, or business leaders, no matter their different styles, they all shared some similar leadership qualities. Mentioning Washington and Lincoln, Gates and Welch, Churchill and Eisenhower, Tom Barnett gives us the similar traits that are common among the great leaders. The traits that will set us apart as leaders and distinguish us from everyone else.

Although leadership skills are necessary quality for every project manager, there are techniques of the craft which are a mandatory part of the PM’s skillset. The PM Hut blog published recently Thomas Cutting’s post How to Really Fix a Failing Project where he focuses on the most important things a project manager should do when his or her project is in trouble. If you can stay calm and follow his advices there is a great chance you will get your project back on track.

PM Hut is a great source of useful information for the project managers. It is some kind of aggregator where they publish articles from many experienced and interestingly writing bloggers in the field of project management (including me, too ).

Writing the project documents is probably the most hated obligation of the project manager. I know a lot of PMs who don’t understand very well the purpose of each document and this is the main reason for their frustration when it comes to writing it. PM Hut has published an article by Sam Elbeik to help in this matter. While his article is pompously entitled The Secret of Successful Project Management it is a simple and understandable explanation of the purpose and the value of the key project documents like the Project Charter, the Plan, and the Progress Report.

At the end I am giving you a very serious article by the PM guru Tom Mochal in the TechRepublic’s PM blog devoted to one of the first things that happen in a project – the kickoff meeting. Why it is important and how you should conduct it – read it here (note: it may require a free registration!)

P.S. This series is inspired by Liz Strauss’ post on thematic link posts, which is a follow-up to Joanna Young’s post on the same subject. Many thanks to both of them for the idea!

You may also find these posts interesting:

• Krishna Kumar Did An Interview With Me On Software Development
• Top-down Planning – Good or Bad?
• The Most Important Rules of Delegation
• Project Management and Hiking
• The 15 Commandments of the True Leader