Managing Product Development

I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks, first preparing and then delivering the teleclass, 3 Crucial Factors for Preventing Your Agile Titanic. If you missed the call, you can still sign up for the replay. If you like what you heard on the replay, join us for the whole series of calls, starting Feb 8, 2010, and  sign up now.

Yesterday, I also did a webinar with Donna Reed, Selecting and Managing the Best Lifecycle for your Project, Team & Solution. Long title, good content :-)

And, the great folks at Dzone posted my video made during the Agile 2009 conference where I spoke about managing the Agile 2009 conference, where I think agile is going, especially for management.

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The Orasi folks have posted my fall webinars, both the audio and PDF presentation. If you missed

• What Makes a Great Product Manager?
• Managing the Project Portfolio
• Delivering the Right Product on Time: Setting Expectations between Engineering and the Three PMs

check out the webinars.

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If you’ve wanted to catch some of my presentations but were unable to make it to a conference or one of my speaking engagements, you have three opportunities this fall that don’t require you to leave your desk. I’ll be doing a series of webinars for Orasi, about the impact of people and relationships on software product management.

The more consulting and project management training I do, the more I realize how important the product management role is. And, it’s very difficult to know if people are performing that role well–the feedback loop between the time a product manager makes a decision and the time that decision impacts the organization can be very long. So, I’m doing a series of webinars, all at 11am ET:

• Sept. 15, 2005: What Makes a Great Product Manager? I’ll be discussing characteristics of great product managers and how to interview candidates to know if they can do what they say they can do.
• Oct. 6, 2005: Managing the Project Portfolio. I’ll discuss how to know what all the work is, and which questions to ask to know whether or not you should be doing the work.
• Oct. 20: Delivering the Right Product on Time: Setting Expectations Between Engineering and the Three PMs. If you’ve ever wanted to settle the discussions between project management, program management, and product management, this webinar is for you.

See Orasi’s page of online events and scroll down to 2005 Fall Expert Series. The abstracts are under the “more info” button.

Please do join me for these webinars.

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I presented a webinar today, Becoming a More Agile Tester. Here’s the PDF. (It’s a talk, so if you read it and think you’ve missed something, you have. Send me email with your question.) I’ve been thinking a lot about test assets these days, and here’s a highlight from the presentation, a comparison of how nimble your tests are, depending on what kinds of tests you have. The reason I’m thinking about nimbleness of tests is simple. Organizations who have a large investment in the upper left corner of this table (and little or no ability to develop more tests in the lower right part of the table) can’t easily move to Agile lifecycles.

There’s at least one thing wrong with this table, because it doesn’t discuss the cost of being nimble. However, I can’t make good generalizations about how much each kind of tests costs, because the table also doesn’t discuss how much risk is associated with not having a particular kind of test. Both cost and risk are particular to each product.

But I do know one thing. The more tests you have that require manual running, and are GUI-based, the harder it is to move to an agile lifecycle. And, agile lifecycles are the best at managing technical and schedule risk.

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