Project Management Antipatterns

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We all think that we are unique. Even when we make mistakes – they are unique. But it seems we are so predictable, that people already studied and classified all our epic fails – past and future ones. So it is very useful sometimes to read about the issues others suffered and compare yourself to the persons described – you definitely find something common. Project managers are not exceptions – you may think you are a smart project manager, but still you can follow some of the well known anti-patterns. I tried to collect the most common ones – which I built myself or observed in action. I found they fancy names on the internet and now I am prepared to use them in my speech, so I would look as smart as the developers talking about their architectural patterns.

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How to Earn Respect of the Team: PM’s Guide

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I never had such an issue or was thinking about this topic during my PM career(Not because I was extremely respected by the developers. It was more like…I didn’t care.) But it seems to be an important question for a lot of Project managers. A good indicator of that is the interview question they keep asking you – “How can you get a team’s respect if you don’t have 10+ years of Haskell development experience???”. Looks like project managers really have some issues with respect…Sometimes I even think that developers treat project managers worse than QAs.. Oh my God, QAs!!! How that can be possible?

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Sprint 0: what we do prior to coding

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When we talk about the development process in outsourcing with my colleagues we usually “start” project with development phase: “So, we got that project and started with the team our sprint 1”. It is the most often phrase you can hear about the kick-off of the project. In the books about scrum you can find a lot about sprints, but so few about sprint 0 and preparation to the development. They start with “Ok, we have a list of features and we need to estimate them and get a backlog”. But where from we get this list of features? We start with design and then hang this design to the developers? Of course, not. We need a good Sprint 0 with a team to be able to start development. And then I discovered that we even need Sprint -1, where we go through the analysis of the project idea.

I just want to share my practical experience, which suits for the outsourcing software development company, that wants to deliver better product-oriented service. I am surprised how far from that we can be in some of our big outsourcing leaders.

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