Masood Mortazavi's Weblog

Friday December 12, 2008

[ Work ] Janice Heiss' interview with me

Starting from a series of exchanges conducted mostly by e-mail and often across multiple time zones as I was traveling in Germany and Russia in the last couple of months, Janice Heiss cajoled me (and I should thank her for it) into this interview.

I hope you'll learn a few things reading it. I certainly learned quite a bit as I was exchanging these ideas with Janice and as I was trying to reply to some of her questions. For example, although I had always been curious about it, I hadn't earlier thought much about how I may respond to Bill Joy's famous essay until Janice actually asked me about it during the course of the interview. (Thank you very much Janice!)

I should probably add that Janice is a Sun staff writer as well as a blogger on Java.Net. She is also the person behind a wonderful series of other interviews with Sun's developers and software engineers—lots of amazing work and ideas are summarized in these interviews: "Meet the Engineer". Finally, I also recommend a reading of her tips for students coming from some of these top developers. There, you are bound to fin (as I did) many nuggests of wisdom.

2008-12-12 16:09:32.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
engineering interviews java software

[ Work ] Is Project Management Dead?

The PMBOK book comes to you courtesy of Project Management Institute. It is considered a standard for project management.
Chapters 1 to 3 are "must" reads. The remaining chapters are further, very useful elaborations of the material in these earlier chapters.
When you read chapters 1 to 3, think of what it would mean to apply the concepts in some project you're facing: Perhaps, you're organizing a large conference, a wedding, or the construction of the next space shuttle.
See which concepts are applicable where.
I used the book, along with cases form the real world, to teach a semester-long graduate course in project management at NPU last summer.
Far from it.

Projects are about unique objectives attained within defined duration.

They are inherently different from operational work.

By the very nature of how we operate as human beings, any cooperative activity involving more than a two or three interactions per person contains within it the seeds of error, missteps and failures. (This may have to do with the common size of family units in some of our societies.)

The whole practice of project management involves instituting processes that meet in anticipation of these errors and failures, handle and check them when they occur and make the necessary adjustments in order to digest the uncertainties that future brings.

If future could be perfectly predicted, there would be no need for project management. If groups could cooperate with a guarantee that no failure or shortcomings would occur on the way to the objective, there would be no need for project management.