Posts Tagged ‘opinion’

Keeping balance in your life

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

I think the topic is applicable to everyone who works. Whether you work for someone or for yourself. You do your best work when you are energized and excited. You can only be energized and excited if you have balance in your life – as a colleague of mine says, you need to fill your buckets before you can do a great job.

When you work for someone else, that can be as simple as not taking work home on the weekend, or taking a two week vacation. When you work for yourself, it gets a bit more complicated. You need to find the opportunities between client needs to refresh yourself.

I’ve found myself thinking lately about all the things I have to do. The problem is  I work better at things I get to do. My blinking alarm was telling me that it was time to take a break. But I still had all these things I had to do.

When I get in this cycle I find it works to look at when I think I can take a break – next week, after a milestone/deadline has passed, whatever works.

Then I plan what I’ll do with my time off and as the day approaches I let people know I am taking a day off.

I find the planning helps me feel like I’m taking a bit of time off because I’m thinking of what I want to do. Not only what I have to do.

I planned my day off for last Thursday and protected the day by letting clients and my business partner know I would not be available. And, it worked.

I not only got Thursday off, but I have been doing more reading and relaxing since Thursday than I’ve done for a couple of months. The added bonus is when I think about the work on my plate, and getting more work, it feels like something I get to do again.

What do you do to fill your buckets?

Happy PMing

Perry

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Posted in motivation, self management | 1 Comment »

Comparing anything to anything- requirements gathering

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

There are any number of blogs, articles, and other sites where you can find out how one thing compares to another. What I don’t see very often is comparison of things to a base list of requirements.

The big thing right now is e-reader comparison, will the iPad kill the Kindle? Is the Kobo reader the best thing since the printing press, should I buy the Sony reader. I have read a lot of these comparisons because I am an e-publisher in my other life. But what I notice when I come to use these comparisons to decide whether I want to buy a device, there are few if any comparisons to my requirements.

This could be because it’s hard for the person posting the comparison to know what I want – my requirements. I think, though that they could come up with a preliminary list. Some do, by default they compare what they think is important. Just like during the requirements gathering stage of a project. The Business Analyst goes in to the client meeting with a base idea of what they might want.

Do you complete a project based on that first cut of requirements? I hope the answer is no. By assuming you know what the client wants, you are guaranteed to have scope issues, stakeholder and client issues, and lots of workarounds.

In a project environment, you get to speak to the client. Take full advantage of that. Get their ideas, needs and wants on the table – at the start, and during the project. I think it’s important to remember that scope change is not a failure of the project, scope change properly managed will improve the client relationship and the success of the project. Scope creep is usually either due to poorly collected requirements, or to poor scope management.

And to those of you out in the Internet who are doing comparisons, please continue. You may not be measuring the comparison against my requirements, but you are doing a great job.

Success in your projects this week.

Perry

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Posted in requirements | No Comments »