WordPress Widgets are Goofed-up

You will notice the sidebar is really lacking in content – look over to the right side of the screen.  Apparently there is a bug in the WordPress code – slightly annoying.  Ok, really annoying considering I spent about 30 minutes thinking I was doing something wrong and finally googled it.  I assume it has something to do with the upgrade to WordPress 2.7 on December 4th.

So until then I don’t have a blogroll, links, rss subscription, etc – hopefully full functionality is restored soon.

- Bill Weber

Context Switching

There are lots of issues to be concerned with when leading a team – who is dependable, who is not?  who is your go-to problem solver?  how do you raise the overall “level of the water” on your team?  All valid concerns.  However, what I struggle with the most is the having a team that must deal with planned strategic-type work and also ad-hoc requests – or better yet, context switching.  Context switching is the changing of focus for one or more of your team members – it is absolutely a productivity killer.

The simple formula that I use to go from a pile of work to the delivery of work is a series of filters or stages… Total Demand -> Prioritized Demand -> Capacity Constrained Demand -> Completed Work

Total Demand – this is the total “list” of all things that must be completed.  It is important to get EVERYTHING on the list and accounted for – if everything is not on the list to begin with you are setting yourself up for failure.

Prioritized Demand – this is a forced ranking of Total Demand – it must be a forced ranking… no ties.  Once forced ranked or “prioritized” the top items should be given estimates – they can be ballpark.

Capacity Constrained Demand – this is understanding how many hours per week (month, deployment cycle, etc) your development team has available.  Example – you have 4 developers on your team.  You assign 40 hours of work per week to each developer for a 4 week development cycle – that is 640 hours of capacity.  Your team can work on the first 640 hours of highest prioritized items.  Clearly this is a simplistic scenario.