Creating an Environment of Leadership I bet you have some problems that have been problems for a while. Or, you want to influence other people to change. You need an environment of leadership, because you can’t do it alone. Here are three tips to creating an environment where everyone can lead: Tip #1: Share the
You have an open position. You have two internal candidates. You’re going to hire one of them. (See Two Candidates, One Position.) Now you have a problem. You have one person who will not be happy. This often occurs when you have two candidates for technical leadership or management positions. You might have a political problem.
Have you seen Nick Korbel’s series about hiring techies? See On Hiring Techies. There are several posts: Evaluate Potential, Not Accomplishments. He’s talking about evaluating qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills. Coding Challenge: A pre-interview audition. The cool thing is that they then discuss the audition in the interview. The Team Interview. I dislike panel interviews.
For years, we bought the cone of uncertainty for estimation—that is, our estimates were just as likely to be over as under. Laurent Bossavit, in The Leprechauns of Software Engineering, shows us how that assumption is wrong. (It was an assumption that some people, including me, assumed was real.) This is a Gaussian (normal) distribution.
Many organizations create teams by their architectural part: front end, back end, middleware. That may have worked back in the waterfall days. It doesn’t work well when you want to implement by feature. (For better images, see Managing the Stream of Features in an Agile Program.) Pierce Wetter wrote this great article on LinkedIn, There is
The Northeast is in the midst of the Blizzard of 2015. Right now, I’m sitting snug in my home office, waiting for the blizzard to be over. I still have power and heat, which is great! I was wondering—what do you do on a snow day? If you’re agile and you are accustomed to having
Is there room for functional managers, such as development and test managers, in agile organizations? Maybe. It depends on whether they take the role of an agile manager. If you have organized as a feature teams-based organization, the functional managers (development, test, analysis, whatever) can take these responsibilities: Develop trusting relationships with the people on
Do you have a resolution to find a new job this year? Check out these tips for a better, streamlined job search. Develop your LinkedIn Profile along with your resume. You need both. You might want to read 7 LinkedIn Profile Tips and Tricks in 2014 That Make a Difference. You cannot afford to ignore LinkedIn.
If you’ve been working for a while, you have a number of people who could be references for you: colleagues, project managers, managers. All of these are people who know what you’ve done. So, how do you choose references? Make sure your reference can talk on the phone. If you select someone who hates talking
As I write the program management book, I am struck by how difficult it is to estimate large chunks of work. In Predicting the Unpredictable and Manage It!, I recommend several approaches to estimation, each of which includes showing that there is no one absolute date for a project or a program. What can you do?