Author: Scott Berkun

Webcast tommorow: 1012 people signed up

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

As of this morning we have over 1000 people signed up for tommorow’s Dr. Dobbs Journal Magazine webcast. This is the first netcast of their brand new Great Writer’s series.

Date: Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Time: 11:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM CT / 2:00 PM ET
Duration: 60 minutes

Register here.

I’ll be going beyond the content in the book, talking about:

  • What they don’t tell you
  • Attention/Intuition/Conviction
  • the difference between the art and science of everything
  • Plus Q&A from the audience

Hope to see you online tommorow!

This week: when the party’s over

Posted on in Management, Software/Web developmentby Scott Berkun

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #44 – When the party (project) is over:

We’ve been working for 7 months on a proof of concept development effort. The job of my team (all 20 of us) was to build a working prototype for a new kind of web application. It was a start-up type effort, highly creative, big challenges, high energy and lots of fun (and hours). But yesterday in our more recent executive review I learned that the project would likely be canceled. We hadn’t failed, but the direction of the company was no longer likely to go where we thought.

My team is in the dark. This is the first I’d heard about us not growing into a real product team. We were led to believe that if we delivered, we’d be the core of the true v1.0 team, and we’ve delivered.

I’m not certain how/when to roll this information out to my team. The decision isn’t final yet, but things do not look good and I’d rather my team was eased into this rather than thrown off the organizational cliff. If the project is canceled, it’s unclear what will happen to my team.

Signed,

What to do when the party’s over?

The 3 ways to work

Posted on in Management, Software/Web development, Teaching/Trainingby Scott Berkun

As an exercise, I’ve tried to distill philosophies of work into 3 possible approaches. Dividing things into threes can be a silly thing to do, as the universe doesn’t really come in threes, but divisions force opinions, so here were are.

Three approaches to work:

  1. Deal with it when it happens. This is just in time life. You do whatever is most urgent or interesting in the moment switching to the next most interesting thing. You deal with the state of whateve you switch to only when you switch to it or are forced to deal with it. You never plan or consider contigencies. You just go, do and move on and accept things as they happen. Strength is making do with what you have. Common nicknames: the procrastinator, Mr. easy going, Yin, the loose cannon, the walking disaster area.
  2. Deal with things before they happen. This means you spend time thinking about what will happen and invest energy ahead of time in making it go how you want. The more you want it, and the more specific the outcome you want, the more time you invest. Strength is in discipline and preperation. Common nicknames: the control freak, the party pooper, Yang, or Mr. Anal retentive.
  3. Plan / prepare and adapt. . You plan for what you want, but you know at the same time that despite your plans, things you don’t want will happen: but that’s ok. Where the plans fail you’ll deal with the moment as best you can (and not just by making another big plan). Strength is in flexibility and diversity. Common nicknames: the natural, the yin/yang master, jack of all trades, Mr. reasonable.

Some people are obssessively dedicated to #1 or #2, always using that strategy no matter what happens. Whenever their strategy fails they resort to digging in deeper and reapplying the same strategy, only with more diligence, which may or may not actually help with the situation they’re in.

But #3 is where the magic is: switching approaches depending on what happens. What’s tricky about this is that there’s no single answer. You have to switch approaches depending on what you observe, planning more or reacting more. It’s the humble choice, in that you have to conceed that you are, despite your pretty plans, not in complete control. But it’s also the proactive choice, since you must also recognize that with no plans at all, you won’t have a rudder to steer by. Some decisions are best served by #2 and some by #1, but it’s never one or the other: it’s both.

And I always wonder why it’s so rare to be taught a philosophy like #3, where you as the student are asked to take responsibility not only for following a strategy, but for picking which strategy to use when.

Notes from FOO camp

Posted on in Travelby Scott Berkun

Here are my short notes from the FOO gathering/conference last week. FOO (Friends of O’Reilly) is an informal conference like thing held at O’Reilly Media’s main campus in Sebastapol, CA. This year (my first) saw some complaints over the invite list, and a bay-area response (the Bar camp).

  • Informality breeds ideas . Despite the number of people the whole thing felt informal, low tech and open. There was no session plan: the first night a big board was put up, and people spend the next hour writing sessions in, moving things around. Totally ad-hoc and chaotic, which, once I got used to it, was wonderful. There were plenty of slots for anyone that wanted to present (though no guarantees anyone would show :). Some sessions were slide decks, others coversations and many were just demos.
  • Coolest stuff seen. Mind you, there were 5 times more sessions than I could possibly have seen and I missed all of Sunday. The Inventibles was most memorible: clever uses of new materials for all kinds of things. And they seemed to be sooo enjoying what they were doing. Squid-labs was a close second, (check out rope and sound) . Black Ops of TCP/IP scared the crap out of me. I missed the Zen scavenger hunt. FOO has posted some session slides and notes.
  • People are friendly when they camp. Because everyone is camping out on the lawn or crashing in empty offices, there’s less pretension, and because the spaces are all shared, it’s natural to be communal (Can I borrow X?). Some conferences always make me feel like I’m at dog show, with little ribbons and awards for everything. Well, making people camp and share showers kills much of that pretension. On the flight home, flipping through Wired magazine, I saw mentions of several people I’d met and shared beer with over the weekend, not completely understanding who they were until then.
  • The basics make things work (and FOO nailed them). I’ve run or attended many events, and the good ones nail the basics: environment, food, tone. Beyond the camping environment, the O’Reilly offices had wi-fi, kitchens, and plenty of conference rooms and offices for our use. Super generous. The food was hi quality buffet style, open bar, and the kitchen staff were great. And Tim and Sara set the right tone: Tim’s opening remarks (an anti-keynote keynote) and friendly style gave a baseline to everyone for how we should treat each other.
  • I’m not as techy as I used to be. Many of the sessions where technological explorations: “here’s an amazing thing, used in a cool way”. But I often felt I’ve been taking too many curmudgeon pills: I kept asking myself ‘where does this go?’, “who does this help?’ and ‘what does this change?’ and not finding answers interesting enough to stick around. I realized how much more I’m interested in design in every sense, the process for coming up with ideas and matching them to problems, and how to manage a gang of people in that process, than anything else. The sessions definitely had an emphasis on new technologies (social software, taging, open source, podcasting, etc.) and different levels of thinking about how to build with them – which I connected with – just not as intensely as the other folks I met. And speaking of more worldly thoughts, I did have some great conversations with Alex from worldchanging.com, and got to meet Jim from benetech.org

    • Foo board
    Foo camp

Reminder: Live webcast next week

Posted on in On Tour, The Art of PM bookby Scott Berkun

Dr. Dobbs Journal Magazine will be broadcasting a live netcast by yours truly on the art of project management. This is the first netcast of their brand new Great Writer’s series.

Date: Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Time: 11:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM CT / 2:00 PM ET
Duration: 60 minutes

Register here. If you sign up you’ll get another reminder before the event.

I’ll be going beyond the content in the book, talking about:

  • What they don’t tell you
  • Attention/Intuition/Conviction
  • the difference between the art and science of everything
  • Plus Q&A from the audience

Hope to see you online next week.

Blog rankings, popularity and quality

Posted on in designby Scott Berkun

How honest are you when mistakes are made in your favor? I bet it depends on your relationship to the mistake maker. If it’s your friend you’ll hapilly point out the confusion (You gave me a $20, not a $5). But if it’s a faceless corporation/government/evil empire, you might keep quiet and pretend you didn’t notice (extra doughnut for me!).

Well what to do about blog rankings? I know how many problems there are for ranking anything (e.g. The academy awards, sports MVPs) but since the blog ranking systems are automated, based on volume, there’s no end to disagrements about which ones are more accurate. Even though equating various kinds of link volume with popularity has various problems.

I know this because I showed up on Feedsters top 500 list at a not quite under the wire 463. Which is odd given that this blog, so far, is low volume, low profile, and mostly about a recently published, and relatively unknown, book. It’s not exactly a mistake: they had some algorithm which produced a list. But many notable high profile blogs didn’t make it, and some odd underlings (this blog) made the cut. I’m holding an undeserved doughnut.

But the most curious thing for me is how despite the belief that blogs exemplify the diversity and freedom of expression that the net empowers, we all still (myself included) are drawn back to single file all inclusive stacked ranked lists. We like to give ourselves a number (Insert favorite flashback to the Prisoner here). We’re compelled, even when it makes us unhappy, to seek out definitive measurements of things.

Instead, it’d be nice to poke at the list, categorize it in different ways, and make it relevant to my interests. I’d like to filter it on sources of links- who are kottke.org‘s or boingboing top ten link targets? – but none of the blog list makers have made their popularity lists flexible, yet.

In specific: I’d rather know who’s popular with the 3 or 4 people I find most interesting, rather than what’s popular with 100,000 people I don’t care about, have no shared interests with or who possibly have the collective IQ of a sack of marbles (present company excluded). Big formula based lists, from big piles of data, run the risk of averaging and rounding out much of what’s interesting.

Coming soon: the difference between popularity and quality.

web developer or designer needed (CSS/HTML)

Posted on in Software/Web developmentby Scott Berkun

Hey folks:

www.scottberkun.com has a list of web dev work that needs to be done. If I don’t hire someone to do it, it won’t happen anytime soon – I’m trying to follow my own advice and delegate.

The work includes:
– Revamping my evil hacky HTML/javascript into nice standards based CSS
– Integrating this blog into the design
– Improving the forums layout (possibly upgrading forums software to something better)
– Possibly other work in the future

Any recommendations? Ideal is someone smart, cool and freelance. Bonus points for visual design clueness. The site is well-trafficked and could find a nice home in someone’s portfolio.

This could be a code savvy designer, or a hard core web developer looking for a light easy project.

Contact me here. Cheers,

-Scott

This week: Assigning programming work

Posted on in Management, Software/Web developmentby Scott Berkun

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #43 – Assigning work to programmers :

I’m a former programmer who now leads a team of programmers and testers. Recently my team has complained about how work gets assigned – right now, I’m air traffic control, directing work at one of the 10 people on my team. I’d like to do something more structured, like what Scott outlines in his book (Chp 13) but my team is split across 5 or 6 different projects: I can’t easily make 2 layers of goals and divide up my team.

My problem is this: I don’t see an easy way to give my team more responsibility for choosing who should work on what without bogging them down in organizational crap. I accept their complaint, but the alternatives seem worse.

So my question is this: What alternatives should I be considering for how to distribute work across my team, given the constraints I’m facing? I’d be happy just to see a list of different approaches people have tried. Bonus for pros/cons.

– The work distributor

Book Tour: Part 2?

Posted on in On Tour, The Art of PM bookby Scott Berkun

I’m planning part 2 of the book tour for the Art of project management for early this fall – and I need your help. The book has been recieved great reviews and I’m trying to help it along and use its success to meet lots of people. This could be you.

I’m compiling a list of companies/organizations that might have me in to speak – once I have that list I’ll figure out how many cities or venues I can afford to hit: I have a budget, but it ain’t much :)

So if you have an idea for a venue, here’s how you can help:

  1. Tell me what the venue is, where it is, how many people there might be
  2. Who to contact there if you know someone
  3. Leave a comment or contact me directly

And keep in mind:

  • Tech companies, businesses, universities, user groups, naked beach parties are all possibilities.
  • Bonus points for venues in the NYC/Boston/Pittsburgh area

Much thanks for all your help and support,

-Scott

This week: Managing the 2nd class project

Posted on in Management, Software/Web developmentby Scott Berkun

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #42 – Managing the 2nd class project:

I am tasked with the creation of a strategy for a relatively low priority product. We have a small team of programmers (Team B) and everyone understands that what we’re making is built to support what one of the other teams is doing (Team A). My questions:

1) How do I keep my team motivated given that we know we’re 2nd class?
2) How do I protect ourselves, and our work, from changes made by Team A?
3) How does a low priority project (and its team) get its share of the limelight?

Manifestos for your mind

Posted on in Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

ChangeThis is back – they’ve been publishing short essays meant to inspire change and provoke new thinking. In the past they’ve included work from Guy Kawaski, Tom Peters, Seth Godin, Malcom Gladwell, Craig Newmark and more.

Were betting that a significant portion of the population wants to hear thoughtful, rational, constructive arguments about important issues. We are certain that the best of these manifestos will spread, hand to hand, person to person, until these manifestos have reached a critical mass and actually changed the tone and substance of our debate.

We’ll they’re back – new manifestos were posted today, including one from me: Why smart people defend bad ideas.

These are posted as stylish PDFs: loathe the format, like the style.

More reviews in for the art of PM

Posted on in artofpm reviews, The Art of PM bookby Scott Berkun

Great to see that these are still coming in:

Lifehacker

The text is light on theory and full of plain talk guidelines, tips and tricks grounded in and illustrated by Berkun’s years of experience leading product teams at Microsoft… A must-read for anyone officially or unofficially in charge of corralling folks together to meet a common goal

Kickstart News

I often tell others that if I go to a meeting or read a book and I learn one thing or get one idea from the experience, then it is worth the money and the time spent. Knowledge is valuable and is our coin of the trade. There is a lot to learn in this book. Berkun brings intelligence, insight, thoughtful commentary and experiences learned from difficult Microsoft projects. It is like learning from and discussing the experiences of a peer or, for new project managers, learning theory and practice from a young master . – Thomas V. Kappel, Kickstart news

Shahine.com

I would go so far as to say this. If you are in this role at a software company, and have been doing it for less than 3 years, this book should be your text book. Nothing will matter more in your career than having a good grasp and mastery of many of the skills highlighted in the book. If you are an old timer, then this book will be an interesting read to say the least, if not help you with a situation you might be facing today (or tomorrow).

If you find other reviews let me know. And of course if you’re willing to review the book for a magazine, website or busy blog, contact me. I can get you a reviewer copy of the book.

Thanks to everyone that’s helped get these reviews out there and to everyone that’s actually bought the book :)

The Personal MBA: learn business on your own time

Posted on in The Art of PM bookby Scott Berkun

I’ve had a half dozen people point me to the personal mba website in the last week. It’s a group of folks convinced you can educate yourself effectively for less than a quarter of the time and money spent in most MBA programs – great idea.

Well today, there’s a new twist. The art of project management has made their updated list of must read books: The PMBA 40 . (Thanks Keith)

They’re forming web-based reading discussion groups to work together on covering all 40. If you’re interested you can sign up now.

Mark the date: Free webcast on the art of project management

Posted on in Management, On Tour, Software/Web development, The Art of PM bookby Scott Berkun

Dr. Dobbs Journal Magazine will be broadcasting a live netcast by yours truly on the art of project management. Registration is free and you can watch/listen right from your desktop. This is the first netcast of their brand new Great Writer’s series.

Date: Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Time: 11:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM CT / 2:00 PM ET
Duration: 60 minutes

Register here. If you sign up you’ll get reminders before the event. Spread the word!