Software Project Management
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Beware of Success Stories The tendency to look back and think you know what contributed to a success is called survivorship bias. It occurs when you make a decision or take some action based on past successes while ignoring past failures. That's why it's important to approach reports of successful projects with a healthy dose of skepticism. |
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Superior Leaders Ask the Tough Questions Inspiring quotes can be motivating, but there's more to good leadership. New leaders may feel compelled to find clever and memorable things to say, when in reality, they should probably focus less on what they’re saying and more on what they’re hearing. The best leaders ask good questions and listen to the answers. |
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Are You Forgetting a Stakeholder? Technology allows amazing innovations to optimize business and deliver new and better services, but if you don’t carefully consider your entire user community, innovations may cost you business. When designing for stakeholders, don't stop at the obvious cases—or else you may find that you forgot an important customer. |
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Are Your Fundamentals Malfunctioning? Every objective has certain elements that are fundamental to its success. These include the supporting tasks or systems that we take for granted but without which our “real” work could not get done. In order for any organization or team to meet its primary objectives, these fundamentals need to be functioning properly. |
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The Many Facets of a Product Manager’s Role It’s a misconception that product managers work only with stakeholders to define a product’s roadmap. Instead, a good product manager empowers the entire team to deliver on their roles within the project constraints, with the end goal of an impactful product. To do that, they ask the team these crucial questions. |
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Deception and Estimation: How We Fool Ourselves Research suggests that humans are biased, not-very-rational decision-makers. We believe we see things clearly when the evidence shows otherwise. Throw in a big dose of optimism, and it's easy to see how estimating software projects can be problematic. Our best hope is to construct diverse groups with varied viewpoints. |
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The ‘Third Rail’ of Project Management: Cutting Quality Scope, schedule, and resources: Whether you’re using agile or more traditional project management approaches, this triple constraint is the law of the project universe. The unmentionable “third rail” of project management trade-offs is compromising quality to deal with the other two aspects. Don't make that an option. |
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7 Habits of Highly Effective Project Managers Project managers are in charge of planning, supervising, and verifying the work of the project team to ensure the project’s goals and success criteria are met. The challenge is to achieve all this within project constraints. The best project managers know how to keep it all balanced. Here are seven of their top skills. |
