Lifecycles and Reading.
I spoke at a joint meeting of the RI PMI and ASQ last night. My presentation was "Predicting Project Completion." I offered a simulation for people to try: predicting the time it would take and then sorting two decks of cards. We learned a lot and had fun.
At the end of the meeting, one of the attendees came up to me and said, "Marketing thinks we have a short market window, and they want a ton of stuff in the product. What can we do?" I suggested he consider one of these lifecycles: agile or design-to-schedule or staged delivery. I don't know anything about the product, nor do I know about the capabilities of the people, so I can't say which is right, but any of these will be better than what he's doing now (a form of waterfall).
I was a little surprised by how few people knew about agile lifecycles (I gave the 2-minute intro in my talk), and by how few people knew about cost to fix a defect or fault feedback ratios. I suspect people working inside organizations are so stressed by the quantity of work that they haven't paid attention to the popular literature about agile techniques or measurement possibilities.
Oh, one more thing. If you're a bloglet reader, I can only hope that you see this (and the several previous) posting. Bloglet has decided there's something wrong with my blogs again. I'll keep fixing and eventually things will work...
[Managing Product Development]
Some good links - the fault feedback ratio is particularly interesting. Aren't we prone just to remember the fixes that worked?
11:52:03 PM 
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