In my role as technical editor for agileconnection.com, I have the opportunity to read many terrific articles. I also have the opportunity to review and comment on those articles. One such comment is what do teams do? Do they “gel” or do they “jell”? Gel is what you put in hair. When you “gel” things,
Do you read Rob Lambert’s Social Tester? He’s been blogging about his experiences finding candidates. Some of my favorites: Certifications are Creating Lazy Hiring Managers Here is a quote from that post: You cannot presume someone with a certification is a talented tester. You also cannot presume someone with no certification is a rubbish tester.
See Three Tips to Streamline Your Hiring, Part 1, Three Tips to Streamline Your Recruiting, Part 2, and Three Tips to Streamline Your Phone Screens, Part 3 to see our story to here. When my client talked about his interviews for developers, he said, “I interview people on the phone and then ask the candidate
Standup or Handoff? You have a geographically distributed agile team. You have team members more than six hours apart. (If you’re not sure how far apart people are, take a look at Managing Timezones in Geographically Distributed Teams). How do you have standups that mean something, when people have completed work, can commit to work, and
I published a Pragmatic Manager yesterday to my subscribers. Normally, I let them enjoy the pleasure of being “in-the-know” about what I have to say this month for a while before I post the emails to my site. Read the Pragmatic Manager here: Standup or Handoff. However, I made a Big Mistake in where I
I talked about streamlining your problem statement and your job analysis in Part 1. In Part 2, I talked about streamlining your recruiting. This part is about is about phone screens. Love them or hate them, most hiring managers (or someone) do them. But how? My client spent the first 10 minutes talking about the
One of the familiar tensions in management is how you encourage or discourage people from bringing you problems. One of my clients had a favorite saying, “Don’t bring me problems. Bring me solutions.” I could see the problems that saying caused in the organization. He prevented people from bringing him problems until the problems were
You might think this is a political post. It is not. This is about management power and women’s health at first. Then, it’s about employee health. Yesterday, the US Supreme Court decided that a company could withhold contraceptive care from women, based on the company’s owner’s religious beliefs. Hobby Lobby is a privately held corporation.
My client in Part 1, where we talked about streamlining your analysis, was also having trouble finding people. He needed to hire two developers. He just “knew” there was a boom in Boston, and could not hire more people. Well, considering I had just been at a SPIN meeting the night before and met people
Peter, a CTO in a small company, shook his head. I have no idea what I am going to do. My CEO wants me to do everything. But I can’t. I don’t have the staff. We don’t know how to scale the PerfApp. We don’t know how to test the NewApp, because we don’t have