http://pmstories.com/en A blog about smarter software engineering and project management Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:54:48 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The PMI definition of a project says that it is "a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service" but it doesn't say why we need to create that product or service. This definition is so often quoted and it makes the impression that the question "Why?" is ... http://pmstories.com/en/2008/06/11/project-goal/ This is an interesting question I've been thinking for a long time on but today I found a post in the Predictably Irrational blog (thanks to Bas de Baar!) and I decided to put my own thoughts on a page. I already wrote about the motivation here but this time ... http://pmstories.com/en/2008/05/28/cash-or-gift/ Bas de Baar asked this question in his blog Project Shrink and asked his readers to suggest their opinions. I have always thought that having motivated people is the key to the project success but I really haven't got "a recipe" how to motivate a software team. In fact, I ... http://pmstories.com/en/2008/04/08/motivate-your-team/ I am going to create new series in my blog called Advices to the novice project managers and I think it would be very helpful especially for software developers stepping into the project management field. There are many occasions when a project manager is tempted to take on some development tasks ... http://pmstories.com/en/2008/02/05/dont-drill-down/ I found recently an article called 10 techniques for gathering requirements. While Tom Mochal is a very competent expert and I admire his opinion a lot, some of the techniques he describes look too trivial - one-on-one interview, group interview, facilitated session - they are pretty much obvious. More interesting to ... http://pmstories.com/en/2008/01/29/requirements-gathering-techniques/ I found this great sentence, which belongs to Edward V. Berard and I am eager to share it with you: Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. Thanks to Irina Marudina for this piece of wisdom. If you like the posts in this blog or ... http://pmstories.com/en/2008/01/25/walking-on-water/ I found recently an article by Richard Lannon entitled 12 Rules of Delegation. While the article is fine and it really gives some insights on how to delegate I think it fails to emphasize the most critical issues of delegating responsibility to the others. I started thinking and looking for some ... http://pmstories.com/en/2008/01/24/rules-of-delegation/ Rich Maltzman is a certified PMP and a project manager with huge professional experience. I didn't know him until recently I found the Fiddler on the Project Wiki where he tries (together with Ranjit Biswas, PMP) to write a book based on the principles of crowdsourcing. While I didn't ... http://pmstories.com/en/2008/01/13/rich-maltzman/ Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror wrote a post called The Two Types of Programmers, which gained a lot of controversial comments. Then he wrote another post trying to explain what he meant in the first one and to bring up the peace but the war has already started. I read ... http://pmstories.com/en/2008/01/11/two-types-of-programmers/ I just received an email from Steve McConnell with the results from the last summer survey about the Classic Mistakes of the software development. I already wrote about this survey in my post Classic Mistakes Forever. Steve published his list of Classic Mistakes for the first time in 1996 in ... http://pmstories.com/en/2008/01/08/classic-mistakes-2008/