I love to debate.  My friends roll their eyes when I use the term “devil’s advocate” because that means I’m about to get started.  I love trading ideas and learning about the world through someone else’s perspective.  It’s probably the writer in me because I love characters, and you can’t understand characters unless you can […]

Recently, I had one of those humbling insights that forced me to realize how much bias I carry around with me.  I met up with the younger brother of a friend at lunch, Jared.  The first time I met Jared, he was 17-years-old and understandably cocky.  We used to play board games together, and he […]

We live in an age where it’s cool to be doing a bajillion things, preferably at once.  If you have the TV going while you’re typing an e-mail, managing your virtual farm, and talking to your mom about the ham you got baking in the oven, you are deemed to be a demi-god of sorts. […]

My sister’s family is in town, partially to visit relatives and partially to celebrate her son’s birthday.  Will has absolutely fallen in love with Pixar’s Cars, so my sister asked if I could order him a Lightning McQueen cake for his birthday.  Two weeks ago, my husband ordered the cake at a local Albertsons, and […]

If you’ve been reading the blog, you’ll notice I have a healthy skepticism of deadlines.   It’s not that I don’t think that you shouldn’t use them or they are not useful.  Far from it.  It just seems to me that so many companies pursue a deadline as if it were the end goal.  But the […]

I took a break last week to read over the last six months’ of Fellowstream blogs.  I didn’t know what this blog was going to be about when I first started.  I knew I wanted to talk about what I’d learned as a project manager for the Torque game engine series.   I knew I […]

It’s my honor to introduce Jake LaCaze, self-described “social media introvert.”  He and I have become tweet buddies over the past several months, and he’s got a fantastic blog and insight into social media.  He took a break from his personal blog to share some thoughts on team management.  Enjoy! Everyone has his own management […]

If you’re even remotely interested in video games, you might have felt a shift in the Force yesterday when Starcraft II came out.  For those of you not familiar with games, Starcraft II has been 7  years in the making.  The company who made it, Blizzard, has a reputation for creating gigantic hits (ever heard […]

So technically, project managers aren’t a branch of HR.  They’re in charge of leading a team to get work done by monitoring schedules, requirements, and resources.  There’s nothing in there that mentions managing people, right? Wrong. If you’re a project manager, you are also, essentially, a people manager.  Even if you just “borrow” people from […]

Remember that time you did everything right on the first try?  How you got the first job you interviewed for?   When you wrote a novel beginning to end with no gaping plot holes?  Or how about the time you dated that guy and ended up marrying him after the first date? Oh right.  You don’t […]