Getting stuff done

The holidays are upon us, or rushing in. I want to wrap up the year with a two-parter, back on the topic of shipping software on time and on budget.

Earlier we looked at estimating, and not doing R&D in production, which give us a framework for both coming up with a schedule and avoiding one of the main risks that it will face.

Now I want to cut back to some preliminaries, that we might encounter before we even get that far. Why is it so difficult to come up with a plan? And why, when we’ve got one, might we constantly find ourselves delivering late?

This month I’ll talk about personal productivity, the second of these topics, and the driver of whether we can actually get things done. Next month we’ll look at getting from a fledgling idea to the foundations of a plan.