Nothing can be more frustrating for a business manager than having to deal with employee turnover. High or low, it is detrimental to your organization. The reality is that the demand for experienced project managers is on the rise, yet less experienced personnel seem to be attracted to the profession. This is part of the reason why project managers are not always effective at their job--they simply are not properly trained in the field. While turnover among project managers is a serious problem, it simply goes undetected in many organizations. Most CEO's and managers accept it as part of the cost of doing business. But successful managers recognize the staggering costs that turnover can have and try to work to lower it as much as possible. This informative article covers the many potential causes for turnover among project managers, how to cope with it, measure it, and hopefully decrease it over time.

Team player Dave Hoover wants to share a software development practice he enjoys. It emerged from the practices of extreme programming as a competitive yet simultaneously collaborative practice. Dave has found that this practice promotes the flow of knowledge between software developers better than any other practice he has experienced. As you might have guessed from the title of this week's column, this practice is called ping-pong programming, or P3 for short.

Getting process improvement "just right" is difficult. Go too far in the definition of processes, and it really does get too hot, with the heat coming from the people trying to use the processes. On the other hand process definitions that are too short to contain anything of value will leave users in the cold, and then there will be no improvement in the organization. Ed Weller states that a useful process improvement activity develops a set of process artifacts that meets the needs of the user. This helps the organization capture "tribal lore" and cast it into a set of process definitions that eliminates waste and improves time-to-market.

One of the most valuable services a QA group provides is preventing failure. Ironically if the group succeeds at this, QA might find themselves unpopular or out of a job. Linda Hayes reveals how typical methods of measuring success can actually cause failure. Especially if success is achieved at the loser's expense.