Managing Product Development

Keith Ray, Dale Emery, and I are writing books. Keith and Dale are tracking their writing with spreadsheets. Dale is posting his progress online. You can see his Oct 8 progress.I decided they were on to something, and start tracking my progress in a spreadsheet also. I have about 35,000 words written. I have about 1/3 of the chapters in progress. Maybe. It depends on when I realize I have to write more or less about a topic.For Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds, I wrote each chapter, sent it to my reviewers, got feedback, wrote the next one, and so on. For Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management, Esther and I first wrote the first draft, got review comments, wrote the second draft, got review comments, pair-wrote the third draft and got review comments.For this book, I’m working with an editor now, so I’m hearing about weaknesses in the writing as soon as I tell him something is available for editing. This is way cool. In a sense, I’m refactoring as I write. (Oh yes, there’s a lot of simplification and clarification going on :-)I’m noticing that when I write down the first draft, I still have a big burst of words, but as soon as Daniel starts giving me feedback, the word count doesn’t change all that much, but does tend to decrease.I’m enjoying the writing-down part of this book more than I expected, because I am receiving more feedback faster. This is the same thing that happens on projects when you have cross-functional teams working on one feature at time. I’m pleased to see how well it works for writing a natural language too.

I’m writing my project management book. I have no idea how far along I am. (Wait, I promise to explain.) When I write, I have several phases: the exploratory phase, where I write articles, the write-it-down phase, where I write the whole thing down (in chunks, of course), and the editing phase. I’m in the write-it-down phase right now. In this phase, I need hours at a time to blast away at a chapter until there’s little enough of it left so I can write it in spurts. (I hope you understood that.)

I was talking with my editor this morning about when I would be done with the first draft, the write-it-down part. I explained that I had a slim chance of being done by mid-October, and a stronger chance of being done at Thanksgiving. Here’s the graph of what that looks like:

Note that there’s a 50% chance I’ll be done with this phase, the write-it-down phase, by mid October. I have a bunch of writing time between now and then for the book. I have some other writing to do, some web site updates, etc. , but most of my time is available for writing the book. If I miss mid-October, I have no writing time until almost the middle of November. That’s why if I’m close in mid-October, I might be able to finish in mid-November. But if I miss mid-October because I’m not close, the mid-November date is quite risky. I have a bunch of writing time from mid-November through early December, but I expect to be traveling again and teaching, which changes my writing time.

This is an example of probabilistic scheduling. I don’t even have a 100% completion date (which you might have to have for one of your projects), because I will be replanning in mid-October, no matter what. Any 100% date I give now will be wrong, wrong, wrong. It will either be too optimistic or too pessimistic, and I won’t know which one until October.

It doesn’t matter what kind of lifecyle you use, the further out the dates are, the less you know. You can use probabilistic scheduling to help you, the project team, and your sponsors see the risk in the schedule.

I’m writing the project management book. I’m noting that sometimes PMs (and teams) perform activities that have no lasting useful effect on the project. One example is doing estimation with feedback. If you estimate but never check reality against those estimates, that’s an example of “mental masturbation: it feels good but there’s no lasting effect.” That’s fine for a rough draft book, but it feels not quite right in a final manuscript. I’m afraid it sounds a bit blaming. (No, I’m nowhere near final manuscript.)

Got any ideas? My editor suggested Soduku (a mental exercise that has no lasting effect). That doesn’t quite fit for me either. I’m thinking of calling these activities “thought exercises” as opposed to “moving-the-project-forward activities” but I don’t really like that either.

If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them. And of course I will acknowledge you if I use your phrase in the book. If you like the phrase mental masturbation, let me know that too.

Update of Sept 21, 2006: Wow, thank you all. You’ve given me lots of ideas to consider. If you still have ideas, please leave them in comments or send me email. Thank you.

I am an early reviewer on Esther Derby’s and Diana Larsen’s upcoming book about retrospectives (Pragmatic Bookshelf, sometime this year).

Here’s a piece of my feedback that puzzled Esther:

“Put those words on weight training!”

Her response was “cute, but what do I do?” I laughed out loud on the phone with her. I was attempting to say something like this: “The verbs you’re using are too weak for me to convey the strength of your ideas. Please use stronger verbs.” But what came out was the weight training.

Now that I’ve explained what I meant, it makes some sense. Esther and Diana will decide what to do about the feedback now that they understand it But feedback like this occurs all the time when people review other people’s work.

If you’re not pairing–which tends to eliminate confusing feedback–make sure your review comments help people see what to change, whether they are writing a natural language or code.

You may have noticed a long time between posts here. I was traveling virtually all of March, and had a tough time with finishing all my client work and making time to blog. Once I was home, I had a tough time with jet lag.

I believe I’m unlagged and ready. I have ton of stuff in partial form, so I’ll be working through the backlog over the next few days.

I just completed an article for a magazine. The original version was about 1400* words long, so the editors removed the last couple of paragraphs, made other minor modifications, and returned the article to me. I accepted most of their edits, added back the “missing” paragraphs, and sent them a note explaining their version was missing text, so I’d added it back. The editor replied explaining the article was too long, so they’d removed a block at the end.

I read their email several times, finally deciding it was worth a laugh. These folks had never heard of the 1/3 rule. I heard if first from Jerry Weinberg (the whole exercise is in Weinberg on Writing).

For a 1400-word article, I didn’t need to cut 1/3 of the pages or 1/3 of the paragraphs; I just needed to could cut 1/3 of the words. And, without much trouble, that’s what I did. The article is much tighter, reads more clearly is clearer, and feels “lighter” to me. When I do my 1/3 exercise, it feels a bit like refactoring.

(I tried to show you what I do with the above paragraph. I cut 15 out of 64 words, not quite 1/3, but close. I hope the strikes help you see how I think about cutting words. I excise adverbs and then reconsider adjectives. Then I look for compound verbs or nouns to see if I can replace them with a better–stronger–word.)

Now all I have to do is explain this to my editors, so they don’t just excise. Pruning by 1/3 works, and works on every level.

* I’d originally written 200 here, not 1400. Bet this makes more sense now. Thank you, George, for letting me know.

I’ve been working on improving my writing for about 20 years. When I was inside organizations, I asked some of my colleagues to review my memos and reports. I gained valuable insights. (”A verb, JR, a verb. Please.”) But once I started my consulting business 11 years ago, I needed more help with my writing. My early reviewers, such as Dave Smith, James Bach, and Brian Lawrence, gave me useful and helpful feedback. But it wasn’t until I participated in one of Jerry Weinberg’s writing workshops that I was able to take my writing to the next level.

If you want to take a writing workshop but don’t feel you have the time or the money to spend a week at a workshop, buy this book. Work through the exercises–yes, all of them. Listen to Jerry’s advice, such as “Never attempt to write something you don’t care about” or “Writer’s block is not a disorder in you, the writer. It’s a deficiency in your writing methods–the mythology you’ve swallowed about how works get written.”

I’m proof these techniques work. I’ve published three books, over 100 articles, and am working on my next few books. Next few books, you ask? Yes. One of the techniques Jerry suggests is that you have many fieldstones, chunks of work in progress. In progress may mean you’ve written two words. It may mean you’ve written several chapter-like things. It may mean you’ve written 50 words. Fieldstones allow you to make progress on any piece of work, which can allow you to finish more writing projects than you could imagine.

If you want to start your writing career, or if you want to write better, or if you want to revitalize your writing, buy this book.

Dorset House has two days left in their sale (where you could also buy Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds). If you prefer, here’s the Amazon link to Weinberg on Writing. But don’t let this year pass without obtaining help from the best teacher on writing, Jerry Weinberg.

I’m reviewing an article from a long-time colleague who’s just started to write. He has great ideas. And the way he’s packaged his ideas (the writing part) doesn’t do justice to them.

There’s a mnemonic* I use (when I remember to help me package my ideas better. It’s Hey! You! See? So…

Hey! grabs the reader’s attention. It can be a sentence, or an idea, but the readers need to see it within the first couple of sentences, so the reader will continue reading.

You! means how does this idea affect the reader? What about this article/idea/book–whatever the writing is–makes it relevant to the reader?

See? is the example piece, the part where the author helps the reader see what the author is talking about.

So… is what you want the reader to do about this once he or she is done reading the work.

I first learned about this from Mark Weisz, who said he learned about it from someone else (whose name I have forgotten) on the old Compuserve forums (which I didn’t know about or participate in).

If you’re writing anything, remember Hey! You! See? So… and your readers will remember your writing.

I appreciate Keith Ray who knew what word I meant (mnemonic) instead of the word I used (pneumonic)

Esther and I have finally integrated all of our reviewer comments for Behind Closed Doors. We’re looking forward to final publisher (that’s Andy and Dave) comments, and copyediting, and then yippee, the book is ready for printing. We think the printing is about 6 weeks away — very fast for a book. Some of you might be saying, “Hmm, how the heck do they do move from final electronic form to a book so quickly?”

Well, Andy and Dave have applied a little software to the publishing process. They start with XML and apply a little software smarts to making a book. That means that once the text is in XML, all you need to do is edit files, commit the changes, and boom, the fixes are in.

If Esther and I were better at XML, we might have written directly in XML and saved the translation step. But we weren’t so we didn’t. The cost was a few days of Andy’s and my time, and a large glass of wine (for me) at the end to celebrate the end of the tedium of translation.

But now, we can be very fast to fix problems. It’s easy to edit XML (because it’s text). And, because we can “make” the book at any time, we can check our fixes to see that they look exactly the way we want them to. No more translations to/from what the publisher uses, because we use what the publisher uses.

This also means we can branch/label so we don’t have to lose what we originally wrote as the first printing when it’s time for second printing.

I’m enough of a geek to be really enjoying this part

Want to know some of the ideas in the book? Esther and I will be blogging about them in the coming weeks…

Esther and I are editing (the next-to-final pass, we think) the book this week, integrating comments from our reviewers. We are very fortunate; our reviewers provided wonderful feedback. And some of the feedback we’re not going to use — at least, not in this book.

One of the hardest things to do, whether it’s in a book or in a project (or many other undertakings), is to decide what you’re not going to do. As we’re walking through the comments, we’ve been asking ourselves, “Is that comment for this book?” We’ve been drawing the boundaries around what we decided to accomplish with this book, and we’re not adding more.

This is frustrating, relieving, and freeing for me all at the same time. It’s frustrating, because I would like to address many of these topics. But it’s relieving , because our reviewers want us to address these topics, and many of them will be going into my project management book (which has been put aside for the moment), to finish this book. Our boundaries are freeing for me, because I don’t have to consider things outside of the boundary for this book; I can consider them for future writing.

Esther and I decided on our boundaries for this book with something that looks like a project charter (but was our purpose for writing the book). If you haven’t developed a project charter yet for your project, do so. It will help you draw — and keep — the boundaries on your project.