The Six Offshoring Engagement Models

Selecting the right kind of engagement model with your offshore programmers (or the company where they work) is the best way to ensure you get more dynamic engineers that will deliver your software with the level of quality you would expect from your own software engineers in the U.S.

Even excellent project management will feel like pushing a rock up a hill when your global programming team doesn’t perform well. My last post described that the huge number of engineers available in India and China aren’t always the kind of programmers you want. In fact only 10% in China and 20% in India are the dynamic engineers suitable for global programming projects. (more…)

Are Your Programmers Dynamic or Transactional?

Offshoring of software development is written off by some as not workable. Many have shared offshoring nightmares and horror stories in articles and blog postings. A recent survey says small company CIOs say they have little interest in increasing their offshore outsourcing in 2008. And many have stopped outsourcing altogether because of management challenges.

CIOs not Offshoring Pie Chart

94% Are Not Offshoring

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Why Outsourcing Fails, Even with Good Project Management

The programming press and IT journals are full of stories about the failure of software outsourcing. The statistics are sobering. Less than 50% of outsourcing meets financial objectives. The outsourcing of many business processes besides software development also has the same less-than-stellar results.

Forrester reports the top three causes of outsourcing failure are: (more…)

Project Management For Dummies Horror Story

Wow, I guess they’ve got a for dummies book on everything now.  Awesome.  There is also of course the 10 minute project manager book in case you find yourself dubbed project manager 10 minutes before the kick off meeting.  (more…)

Project Management Books/Methodologies to Live By and also Die Slow Deaths From

I thought it would be fun to list some impressions of favorite and least favorite Project management books and methodologies.  I wrote none of these.  You too, can feel free to refute my oppinions or add your own replies or spam us with the latest project managment religion.  Why not?  Everyone else does.  (more…)

Dictated dates…not!

BossWe’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 project manager is accept the dictated date. By doing that you are just delaying the inevitable. You’ll be late and then you’ll be in even more trouble for not raising it earlier. So, just say no!

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Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

t-zebra_close-sxchu_com-879534_19206261-c_nicolas_raymond.jpgWe weren’t built for this. “This” being a life in which we are constantly in a stress response. That is my key take away from a fascinating book by MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Robert Sapolsky.

In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers Sapolsky writes that we aren’t built to withstand constant, high levels of stress. And that our bodies break down over time because of it.

If you study animals in the wild, and look at how they use the (more…)

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