Jose Solera

One of the issues that comes up when teams split the work is that, sometimes (grin), what is delivered to another team member or to the end customer is not what was intended. We are familiar with the processes to ensure that the customer gets what they want (or at least what they signed off [...]

So, you’ve met your stakeholders and gotten their support. Everyone agrees on the size of the breadbox. Details are needed, but those will be identified during requirements gathering. How do you plan to pursue the project? Should you draft a plan on your own since your team is brand new and they don’t know any [...]

As we discussed yesterday, there are many project decelerators, among them lack of stakeholder support. Whether the stakeholders support your project or not, if they are important to your project, you must secure their support. How do you do that?
First, you must identify who your stakeholders are. Just because they are important in the organization [...]

You are excited. A newly minted project manager, you have just received your first assignment: develop the new version of your company’s external web site. You have great ideas, a great team, and you are ready to go. “Oh,” says your manager, “before you get started you need to check with VP Jane Doe on [...]

My last role at Intel was leading a leadership development effort for a large group in the IT organization. I learned a lot about leadership, its development, and what it takes for such a development effort to succeed in an organization (not easy). As I surfed our blog site, I looked for leadership articles and [...]

We’ve all been there. “Here’s a project. It needs to be done in three months!” You get that sinking feeling that you are already late and you don’t even know what it is that the project is trying to achieve.
How do you handle these situations?
In my experience, the worse thing you can do as a [...]

Last year I wrote about Map Days (search for Solera and you’ll find my entries). You may recall that Map Days are the face-to-face sessions used to develop plans under NSPM (No Surprises Project Management by Timm Esque). During these sessions, all team members get together to develop a plan that builds on the group’s [...]

What is it about software development projects that is different from many other types of projects? There are many things, but Scott Adams nailed on the head one of them with his March 16th Dilbert cartoon which gave me the idea for this column’s title. In the strip, Pointy Haired Boss says “My management philosophy [...]

As I was mulling the blogs to write this week, along came my regular email from Projects @ Work including a link to David Schmaltz “Unlearning Project Management” published on March 17, 2008 (you may need to register to get access). The article is a recap of a PMI-published study by Lauri Koskela and Greg [...]

Early in my PM career, back in the 1980s, I was assigned the technical leadership of a software migration effort. I dutifully identified tasks, resources, and loaded those into the MS-DOS version of Microsoft Project (remember the days?) I then proceeded to assign the tasks and track their progress. Before that, though, I noticed that [...]

Deliverables-based project management, or as Timm Esque, author of “No Surprises Project Management”, calls it “Commitment-based” project management, makes tracking of deliverable completion relatively easy. Rather than worrying about the task details, the PM worries about the status of the deliverable. And here are a few rules I apply:
1. It is either “done” [...]

So, what happens during map day? Yesterday I gave a quick overview of the process but now it is time to provide more details.
The objectives of a map day can vary depending on where a project is. At the beginning, it is a way for all team members to get to know each other and [...]

How do we communicate PM’s Intent? Here’s an idea.

Project leadership vs. project management: it’s time to apply more leadership and less management!

Earlier this week I described my experience with Agile in pre-history (pre-Internet days). As I’m engaging again in SW development, I’ve been looking into how I would organize an Agile project if I had to come up with a methodology.
Jim Highsmith, in his book “Agile Project Management” (same book I mentioned in my prior post), [...]

Back in history, pre-Internet days, I was in charge of developing a new IT system to support Marketing. While this was a Marketing system, the sponsor, my boss, was in Finance. And to complicate things, Sales provided the funding! And they wanted us to be fast…in less than three months! That’s without having requirements, mind [...]

After leading a number of projects, you are asked to lead a major effort with multiple teams working somewhat independently but contributing to the same goal, a big budget, the company future depends on your results … you get the picture. Is this just a large, complex project or are a program, and what are [...]