Barrels and ammunition

June 07, 2021

#40 – June 07, 2021

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Suddenly, the future of work materialized, and when your entire team is working from home, pair programming is not only possible but extremely valuable. Preparing yourself and your team for remote pairing will help prepare you for the future of work.

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In short, the output of your organization is dependent on the number of people that can own projects and see them through to the end.

You may not be a project manager. Perhaps you are a developer who likes to code and solve technical challenges. The organizational matter is something you care less about. After all, your company is likely relying on some agile methods and there are product owners and/or SCRUM masters to handle the process. You just need to build new features.

A strong PM & EM partnership is at the heart of all high-achieving software development teams. While the specific titles may be different in different-sized organizations, we’ve found that great software teams consistently need the same leadership ingredients. Too often, building this partnership is left to chance and months (or years) of trial and error. This seems short-sighted given its importance, so we encoded what we’ve learned into a guiding framework for how EMs + PMs can partner together.

It’s well-established that estimating software projects is hard. One study by HBR found that one in six IT projects had cost overruns of over 200% and were late by almost 70%. Another study by McKinsey found that IT projects are on average 45% over budget and 7% over schedule. They found large software projects were particularly bad: software projects with budgets over $15M went over budget by an overage of 66% and had schedule overruns averaging 33%.

I am sure you are familiar with the following scenario: a user is reporting to your Support team that something is not working for him as expected. Your Support team investigates the issue and agrees that there is a bug in the system. They open a JIRA bug to the R&D department with all the information they have collected, as expected from them. But then…

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