people management

Create project dashboards to display project progress and drive your team to success.

Turn to The Last Word, where software professionals who care about quality give you their opinions on hot topics. This month, Johanna Rothman explains what technicians can do to convince management that context switching in the technical world is a sure-fire means to a late project.

What do you do when assigned the role of project customer, with a team that has never worked with a customer, building an application that was barely thought out? Sound like a nightmare? It doesn't have to be. Find out how one project manager beat the odds to produce a high-quality, on-time release.

Typical metrics are used to predict an outcome by comparing plans to actual results. They are objective and don't influence what you are trying to measure. Biased metrics, on the other hand, are a valuable tool for deliberately altering behavior to improve the performance of a group. Find out how biased metrics can be used on your projects to pinpoint problems in specific areas and to influence people to fix them.