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Index
Making Things Happen
FOREWORD
PREFACE
Who should read this book
Assumptions I’ve made about you in writing this book
How to use this book
How to contact us
Safari® Books Online
1. A brief history of project management (and why you should care)
Using history
Learning from failure
Web development, kitchens, and emergency rooms
The role of project management
Program and project management at Microsoft
The balancing act of project management
Pressure and distraction
Confusing process with goals
The right kind of involvement
Take advantage of your perspective
Project managers create unique value
Summary
Exercises
I. PART ONE: PLANS
2. The truth about schedules
Schedules have three purposes
Silver bullets and methodologies
What schedules look like
Piecemeal development (the anti-project project)
Divide and conquer (big schedules = many little schedules)
Agile and traditional methods
Why schedules fail
Shooting blind from very, very far away
A schedule is a probability
Estimating is difficult
The world is based on estimation
Good estimates come from good designs
The common oversights
The snowball effect
What must happen for schedules to work
Summary
Exercises
3. How to figure out what to do
Software planning demystified
Different types of projects
How organizations impact planning
Common planning deliverables
Approaching plans: the three perspectives
The business perspective
Marketing is not a dirty word
The technology perspective
The customer perspective
The magical interdisciplinary view
The balance of power
Asking the right questions
Answering the right questions
What if there’s no time?
Catalog of common bad ways to decide what to do
The process of planning
The daily work
Customer research and its abuses
Bringing it all together: requirements
Problems become scenarios
Integrating business and technology requirements
Summary
Exercises
4. Writing the good vision
The value of writing things down
How much vision do you need?
Team goals and individual goals
The five qualities of good visions
Simplifying
Intentional (goal-driven)
Consolidated
Inspirational
Memorable
The key points to cover
On writing well
It’s hard to be simple
Writing well requires one primary writer
Volume is not quality
Drafting, reviewing, and revising
A catalog of lame vision statements (which should be avoided)
Examples of visions and goals
Supporting vision statements and goals
Visions should be visual
Visualizing nonvisual things
The vision sanity check: daily worship
Summary
Exercises
5. Where ideas come from
The gap from requirements to solutions
Quality requirements and avoiding mistakes
Design exploration
Fear of the gap and the idea of progress
There are bad ideas
Good or bad compared to what?
Thinking in and out of boxes is OK
Good questions attract good ideas
Focusing questions
Creative questions
Rhetorical questions
Bad ideas lead to good ideas
Good designs come from many good ideas
Perspective and improvisation
Improvisational rules for idea generation
More approaches for generating ideas
The customer experience starts the design
A design is a series of conversations
Summary
Exercises
6. What to do with ideas once you have them
Ideas get out of control
Managing ideas demands a steady hand
Changes cause chain reactions
Creative work has momentum
Checkpoints for design phases
How to consolidate ideas
Refine and prioritize
Prototypes are your friends
Where do prototypes start?
Prototyping for projects with user interfaces
Prototyping for projects without user interfaces
Prototypes support programmers
Alternatives increase the probability of success
Questions for iterations
The open-issues list
Summary
Exercises
II. PART TWO: SKILLS
7. Writing good specifications
What specifications can and cannot do
Deciding what to specify
Who is responsible for specifications?
Specifying is not designing
Describing the final design versus how to build it
Good specs simplify
Ensure the right thing will happen
Who, when, and how
Writing for one versus writing for many
When are specs complete?
How much is enough?
How to manage open issues
Closing the spec gap
The significance of hitting spec complete
Reviews and feedback
How to review a specification
Who should be there and how does it work?
The list of questions
Summary
Exercises
8. How to make good decisions
Sizing up a decision (what’s at stake)
Finding and weighing options
Emotions and clarity
The easy way to comparison
Discuss and evaluate
Sherlock Holmes, Occam’s Razor, and reflection
Information is a flashlight
Data does not make decisions
It’s easy to misinterpret data
Research as ammunition
Precision is not accuracy
The courage to decide
Some decisions have no winning choices
Good decisions can have bad results
Paying attention and looking back
Summary
Exercises
9. Communication and relationships
Management through conversation
Relationships enhance communication
A basic model of communication
Common communication problems
Projects depend on relationships
Defining roles
The best work attitude
How to get people’s best work
The motivation to help others do their best
Summary
Exercises
10. How not to annoy people: process, email, and meetings
A summary of why people get annoyed
The effects of good process
A formula for good processes
How to create and roll out processes
Managing process from below
Non-annoying email
The good piece of email
An example of bad email
An example of good email
How to run the non-annoying meeting
The art of facilitation
Facilitation pointers
Three kinds of meetings
The evil of recurring meetings
Meeting pointers
Summary
Exercises
11. What to do when things go wrong
Apply the rough guide
Common situations to expect
How to know you are in a difficult situation
The list of difficult situations
Make practice and training difficult
Take responsibility
Damage control
Conflict resolution and negotiation
Roles and clear authority
Everyone should know who the decision maker is
An emotional toolkit: pressure, feelings about feelings, and the hero complex
Pressure
Natural and artificial pressure
Feelings about feelings
The hero complex
Summary
Exercises
III. PART THREE: MANAGEMENT
12. Why leadership is based on trust
Building and losing trust
Trust is built through commitment
The elements of effective commitment
Trust is lost through inconsistent behavior
Make trust clear (create green lights)
The different kinds of power
Do not rely on granted power
Work to develop earned power
Persuasion is stronger than dictation
Be autocratic when necessary
Trusting others
Delegation of authority
Trust is insurance against adversity
Models, questions, and conflicts
Leaders define their feedback process
Trust and making mistakes
Never reprimand in real time
Trust in yourself (self-reliance)
Summary
Exercises
13. Making things happen
Priorities make things happen
Common ordered lists
Priority 1 versus everything else
Priorities are power
Be a prioritization machine
Things happen when you say no
Master the many ways to say no
Keeping it real
Know the critical path
Be relentless
Be savvy
Guerilla tactics
Summary
Exercises
14. Middle-game strategy
Flying ahead of the plane
Check your sanity
Tactical (daily) questions for staying ahead
Strategic (weekly/monthly) questions for staying ahead
Taking safe action
Breaking commitments
The coding pipeline
Aggressive and conservative pipelining
The coding pipeline becomes the bug fix pipeline
Tracking progress
Hitting moving targets
Dealing with mystery management
Exploring the impact of change
The potential reach of change
Managing changes (change control)
Summary
Exercises
15. End-game strategy
Big deadlines are just several small deadlines
Defining exit criteria
Why hitting dates is like landing airplanes
Angle of descent
Why changing the angle can’t work
Why it gets worse
The rough guide to correct angles of approach
Elements of measurement
The daily build
Bug/defect management
The activity chart
Keep it simple
Evaluating trends
Useful bug measurements
Elements of control
Review meeting
Customer/client reviews
Triage
Daily/weekly triage
Directed triage
War team
The end of end-game
The release candidate (RC)
Rollout and operations
The project postmortem
Party time
Summary
Exercises
16. Power and politics
The day I became political
The sources of power
The misuse of power
Process causes for misuse of power
Motivational causes for misuse of power
Preventing misuse of power
How to solve political problems
Clarify what you need
Managing up
Who has the power to give what you need?
Understanding their perspective
Who do they trust and respect?
The illusion of group power
Make an assessment
Tactics for influencing power
The direct request
The conversation
The use of influence (flank your objective)
The multistage use of influence
The indirect use of influence
The group meeting
Make them think it’s their idea
References for other tactics
Know the playing field
Creating your own political field
Summary
Exercises
A. A guide for discussion groups
Introducing the project management clinic
How to start your own discussion group
Finding people
Launching the group
The follow-through
Sample discussion topics
Balancing my time with team time
Customers versus team
To innovate or not to innovate
My boss is a blowhard
Keeping meetings lean
Death by disaster
Train wreck in progress
The fight against featuritis
Ultimate fighting championship-style team meetings
In-house or off-the-shelf
Everything is urgent
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Philosophy and strategy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For this revised edition
From the previous edition
PHOTO CREDITS
Index
About the Author
COLOPHON
Copyright
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