I sent a Pragmatic Manager email last week, How to Avoid Three Big Estimation Traps. If you subscribed, you’d have seen it already. (That was a not-so-subtle hint to subscribe 🙂 If you’re not sure of the value of being on yet-another-email list, browse the back issues. You can see I’m consistent. Not about the
Have you read The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture? If not, it talks about hiring processes where companies Hire people “just like us” Where candidates can’t tell they are on interviews Where, if you wear a suit, you might be disqualified, because, hey, we don’t wear suits here.
How to Avoid Three Big Estimation Traps I bet you need to estimate how large your project or program will be, at the gross level: “It’s bigger than a breadbasket. It’s smaller than a person on the moon.” More likely, “It’s about x people for about y months with this percentage confidence.” Or, you use
“OK, I’m really glad we can start this management meeting now. It’s time to talk about standardization. I want to create standards for our projects. I want to standardize on agile for all of our projects.” Joseph, the CIO, thought all of his directors would be pleased. “Uh, Joseph, are you telling us you want
In a recent estimation workshop, one of the participants asked, “How do we estimate something we’ve never done before?” “Is it a feature or a project?” I asked. “A feature,” she said. “How do you do things now?” Based on her previous comments in the workshop, I suspected she was pretty good at what she
If you’ve been paying attention to agile at all, you’ve heard these terms: pairing and swarming. But what do they mean? What’s the difference? When you pair, two people work together to finish a piece of work. Traditionally, two developers paired. The “driver” wrote the piece of work. The other person, the “navigator,” observed the
Workshop: Create Your Successful Agile (& Lean) Project Workshop Workshop Objective: Learn how to deliver value as a collaborative team. You’ll use agile and lean principles, and experiment with various practices to help you find your agile approach. Workshop Overview: As you practice with your project, you’ll learn how to create your collaborative team. Then,
I will be at Agile 2014 next week. So will about 1800 other people. I bet some of you are looking for new jobs. Would you like an Open Jam session about looking for a new job? I can conduct a timeboxed, up to one-hour session about Manage Your Job Search. If you only want
In preparation for my talk, Agile Projects, Programs, and Portfolio Management: No Air Quotes Required, I have created a Minimum Reading List for an Agile Transition. Note the emphasis on minimum. I could have added many more books to this list. But the problem I see is that people don’t read anything. They think they
I have an article in a new online magazine, Women Testers, the July 2014 edition. My article is called “Why Testing?” When I was a tester or a developer, I asked many questions. As a project manager, program manager or consultant, I still ask many questions. One of those is the Why question. This article