PSI CONTRIBUTION Contingency, or margin for error, can be thought of as the gap between your fallback position and your actual goal. Here the maximum PSI contribution is 10. You get a score out of 5 points on Step 5 if you've ... [full story]

APPLICATION TO SOFTWARE ENGINEERING We promised you some additional tactics to help protect yourself from predatory bosses and customers while at the same time keeping things civilized. Here they are. Bosses or customers often want to know at the beginning of the ... [full story]

A WORD ON COMMITTING Sooner or later in projects we have to commit. In doing this, we basically make a promise and then try to make that promise happen. If everything turns out as we predicted, then we are heroes; otherwise ... [full story]

MANAGE EXPECTATIONS OK, you've built the model of your project using Steps 1–4. You've built in contingency using Step 5a. Now you're ready to go to the powers that be, be it your boss or your customer, and tell him the ... [full story]

ASSIGNING PEOPLE TO JOBS OK. You have your list of jobs from Step 2 of structured project management, you have got a group of people, some of whom are a spectacular match for particular jobs, some less so. You now need ... [full story]

MAXIMIZE STRENGTHS Or to put it slightly more negatively, but more bluntly: Minimize the risk of some turkey screwing up your project! If you're lucky, you may be in a position where you can identify exactly the person you need to undertake ... [full story]

PEOPLE'S OTHER COMMITMENTS We once turned around a software development project that was meant to last a year and ended up lasting nearly four years. When we looked back over its history to try to understand what had happened, here's what ... [full story]

EACH JOB HAS A NAME One of the things we do in my company is to turn around projects that are running out of control. There are basically two phases in doing this. One is to understand why the project is ... [full story]

A ROLE MODEL If we are looking for a project manager to act as a role model, we can do no better than to look at some of those old cattle-drive Westerns with John Wayne as the trail boss. (You could ... [full story]

INTRODUCTION I had a boss once, a man from the North of England. No project was too daunting for him, whether it was software development or house renovation. I used to pass the house he was then renovating on my way ... [full story]

PSI CONTRIBUTION Step 1 contributes 20 towards the PSI. You can think of the score out of 20 as being a measure of how completely well-defined or otherwise the goal of the project is. At the beginning, when the project goal ... [full story]

APPLICATION TO SOFTWARE ENGINEERING As I wrote the first edition of this book, my company was managing a project to develop a large software product for a major telecommunications company. The entire project was estimated to be in excess of 600 ... [full story]

CHANGES TO THE GOAL AND CHANGE CONTROL Nobody, least of all myself, is daft enough to believe that the goal, once set, will never and can never change. In the real world we expect that things will have been forgotten, overlooked, ... [full story]

MOTIVATING THE TEAM Visualizing the goal gives you a vision with which to inspire people who may work on the project with you. It's all very well you being fired up, but what about the people who are going to work ... [full story]

MOTIVATING THE TEAM Visualizing the goal gives you a vision with which to inspire people who may work on the project with you. It's all very well you being fired up, but what about the people who are going to work ... [full story]

THE REASON FOR THE GOAL Setting your eyes on the prize gives you your whole reason for undertaking the project. Life is short and we only pass this way once. If you're going to put some period of your life into ... [full story]

IDENTIFYING THE GOAL Step 1 clearly identifies the goal. In the race to the South Pole between Scott and Amundsen Amundsen's goal was identified from the outset: he intended to be the first man to stand at the South Pole. Scott's ... [full story]

STRUCTURED PROJECT MANAGEMENT: THE TEN STEPS The Ten Steps are the cornerstone of structured project management. They are covered in the next ten chapters of this book. The Ten Steps are: Visualize the goal; set your eyes on the prize; Make a list of ... [full story]

ANALYZING AND PLANNING PROJECTS THE NATURE OF PROJECTS This book deals primarily with software development projects, although much of what is said here will be applicable to projects in any discipline. In particular, the definition of "project" that I am going to ... [full story]