I don't often use blog space to link to others postings. However, I've added Tom Evslin to my blog roll. Tom is a real software management success story. I clearly can't teach him anything. He's clearly much smarter than me. However, he's stuck in a rut badly burned from years of running development groups that gave him no insight into their methods. I'm sure he doesn't trust a software developer as far as he could throw one. He lives in a world where he can't even imagine the type of transparency of reporting, accuracy of estimating, near perfect quality and high level of productivity possible on a well run agile management or FDD project. If I showed him some of my work, he'd think he'd gone to sleep and woken up in a parallel universe - what do you mean, you can see all the development work in action, as it happens? Tom's writing in Managing Programming for CEO's is very amusing, very real and very readable. I'll certainly be following it regularly. But Tom, (sing along now) it doesn't have to be that way...

If you're the CEO or are ever going to be, you've got to know when things are going to be DONE.  Nothing else matters; you can't sell or use half done or 95% done.  As I blogged the other day, "95% done" is programmer-speak for the remaining 5% will take 95% of the total elapsed time.  You are asking for trouble if you try to manage by the percentages.

[Tom, there is warm welcome at Building 25 any time you want to come and see what can be achieved with Visual Studio Team System, MSF v4.0 and the agile management reports available out of the box ;-), David]