Scott Berkun was at our Newark campus today giving a talk "Schedules and other lies: the myths of making good software on time." So I'm at Menlo Park, which is across the bay. And my truck is in the shop. No sweat. Hop on the free campus shuttle and head over to Newark for a free talk. To top it off Scott is handing out free copies of his book "The Art of Project Management." Schaweet .

So Scott worked at Microsoft for ten years - which made me raise my eyebrow. Why does a person that worked at Microsoft come to Sun to pitch a book? *shrug* What was more important is that he was a program manager for ten years working on Internet Explorer - a major piece of software. So that meant he had experience, and probably something meaningful to say about the art of project management.

Well, he did. It was a good talk. He was energetic and made some good points. One that struck me in particular was this: look at the diagram, y axis being effort, x axis being time. As the project progresses along in time (x), then effort should decrease accordingly. So there's diagonal line indicating this relationship. But in reality the line (in red) will actually deviate outwards as the level of effort continues to grow. So we spend our time chopping out features to get that line to come back down. So his point was that if we have the ability to do that, then we have the ability to actually keep the project below that line (in blue), and cut features when we approach the boundary, instead of exceeding it and spending effort trying to get the project back in line. We constantly try to do too much.

There's a number of resources at Scott's website: forums, essays and a PM clinic. The forums are just starting out, so there's not much traffic there. The PM clinic looks promising. If you scroll down the signup page, you'll see an archive of previous discussion topics.

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Published: (2005-05-10 20:03:44.0)