When your idea of a completed task is significantly different from that of your team's members, you're asking for trouble. In this week's column, Peter Clark outlines some steps you can take to ensure that everyone on your team understands your expectations when you ask them if they're "done."

In this corner—A harried project manager whose testing time has just been cut in half. And in this corner—A time-honored management tool to scale back project scope and make testing tasks do-able. Johanna Rothman shows us the ropes of timeboxing and explains why time constraints don't have to be a TKO.

Think working on five projects at once will make great results appear like magic? Don't be so sure. The price your team pays by switching from one project to another could make your productivity disappear. Johanna Rothman reveals the smoke and mirrors behind the illusion of multiprojecting.

"We want the software to be faster, better, cheaper!" the marketing guy declares. We want to deliver, but if we aren't positive what those adjectives mean, we will fail. Read on to learn how a road trip prompted industry veteran Esther Derby to revisit how to avoid the expectations gap.