Planning

Peter Clark's company recently embarked on a "Lean Office" initiative. Now, Peter thinks many of you have steam shooting out of your ears just from reading those words. You probably think that it is just another lame management initiative that will take valuable time away from what is really important: coding and (maybe) testing. But in this week's column, Peter explains why this is the best initiative yet.

There are several topics that can trigger near religious fervor in software developers--languages, indentation, and comments come immediately to mind. One of Peter Clark's personal favorites is the relationship of issue priority to issue severity in defect tracking systems. Just what the heck do all those levels mean, anyway? In this week's column, Peter describes a solution that his company devised to clearly define the characteristics of severity and priority and help them better understand how the two work together.

Scheduling a project can become a comedy of errors if you don't remember to plug in all the necessary pieces. In this week's column, Peter Clark takes us to a project kick-off meeting and shows us how to spot several common mistakes people make when creating project schedules.

Drawing up a to-do list sounds like a logical starting point when you want to prioritize your workload. But if you have an extra-long list of tasks, the list you should start with is the not-to-do list. Doing so forces you to take an extra hard look at what you're doing and if you should be doing it. Learn more about Johanna Rothman's not-to-do list, how it helps you stay focused on the most important tasks, and how it inevitably helps you maintain your value to the organization.