The Mindset

Well, the Israeli elections are over, and the results took (almost) everyone by surprise. Small parties, which no one thought will get into the parliament, managed to sweep the public, and now have a significant electoral power.
The interesting story is that no pre-elections poll managed to anticipate this immense movement of voters from their traditional parties […]

A general term referring to any activity done to address an unexpected problem revealed at a highly inconvenient time, although it should have been anticipated and handled earlier.
Psychologists who studied closely the software industry found out that working in a crisis mode usually brings the best out of people. A group of researches from Boston […]

A deadline is a managerial tool widely used to maximize the performance of employees. Its main purpose is to increase the earning of the company without investing more money in human resources (see also: Unpaid Overtime).

It is a strange, but well-established, observation, that a deadline can never be met. The reason is not the poor […]

The term Multitasking originally referred to the ability to run two or more processes on one computer at the same time. This is usually achieved using a context switch mechanism, which means that each process is executed for a given period, and then replaced by a different process, while storing the state of the previous […]

The lexicographical definition of the word Priority is “Precedence, especially established by order of importance or urgency”. For years, tasks prioritization was successfully used for managing companies, projects and people.

At about the same time scientists first witnessed the hole in the Ozone layer, software developers around the world discovered a strange anomaly in the Priorities […]

Sometimes you hear managers use magic arguments, which seem to rebut any argument about the need for improvement. The beauty of these arguments is in their generality: they seem to fit any discussion on any issue and always explain why things should stay as they are.
As a service to the new generation of managers, […]

Jürgen Ahting wrote a great post about cost estimation, risk analysis, managerial accountability, and the (often not obvious) connection between them.
I feel a need to stress what seems to me as the main point in this article: the lack of accountability. Many problems in managing software projects (and managing in general) are derived from […]

In February 2006, while my first book was still being reviewed and edited, I’ve decided to start writing about a topic that was lying in the back of my mind for quite some time.
I didn’t know (and still don’t) if I can turn it into a "real book", or how it will evolve, so I’ve […]

In Quality In The Real World I’ve suggested an abstract formula for practicing quality in your business environment. According to this formula, achieving quality from a business perspective is balancing all the aspects and forces affecting the way you create your products and finding the golden path that will maximize your benefit for the long […]

Here’s a rhetorical poll: How many times have you heard (or said) one or more of the following sentences:

Time to market is more important to us than quality.
Our customers don’t care about quality. They just want the product delivered as soon as possible.
We have to settle for “good enough quality” because we don’t have […]