7. Mañana Photo by Mark Lisao (markldxb@gmail.com) We all have windows of time within which we recognize that we need to start moving and keep moving to complete some work. Delivery dates beyond those windows create no sense of urgency, and therefore little motivation to act.

You see the opposite of this pattern when a manager’s attention is on politics, administration, procedures, and kowtowing to more-senior managers. Drawing and adjusting PERT and Gantt charts seem to be more important than talking to the team. And some managers do much of the actual development work instead of looking after the needs of the team.

“Different methodologies are needed on different projects.”

What’s so bad about managers being optimistic and displaying a little emotion? Nothing, of course. But when you find a project manager whose communication is skewed very strongly to this end of the spectrum, you will typically discover two problems. First, this style of reporting does not really fulfill the most fundamental purpose of all project s

Sometimes, on projects, film critics have real jobs and their criticism is more or less a hobby. Other times, they are actually chartered to be film critics by a manager who values this behavior. Either way, all film critics share one trait: They believe that they can be successful even if the project they’re on is a failure. They have, in effect,

A discipline that makes implied commitments markedly more manageable is to declare publicly a small number of important commitments. They are written down and shared with all parties. The maker and receiver of the commitment have to agree on the wording before the commitment is revealed to anyone else. This only works if the number of explicit comm

Humans are effective improvers, naturally, and few of us are naturally comfortable creating from whole cloth.

How can you avoid building a Soviet-style product? Make sure your project plan includes tasks explicitly focused on nonfunctional requirements. That sounds easy, but consider that most Soviet-style systems got that way because nonfunctional qualities were simply ignored.

Most adrenaline junkie organizations contain at least one bottleneck. This is the hero who makes all the design decisions, is the only source of requirements, or makes all the architectural decisions. He is playing two roles: One is to make himself appear to be busier than mere mortals can hope to be. The second is to produce a logjam of decision-m