Making Things Happen. Mastering Project Management

Spis treści książki

• Making Things Happen
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
  • Who should read this book
  • Assumptions Ive 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 theres 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
      • Its 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 (whats at stake)
    • Finding and weighing options
      • Emotions and clarity
      • The easy way to comparison
      • Discuss and evaluate
      • Sherlock Holmes, Occams Razor, and reflection
    • Information is a flashlight
      • Data does not make decisions
      • Its 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 peoples 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 cant 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 its 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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