In Hiring for an Agile Team: Who Do You Need?, I asked you to consider the kinds of people you were looking for. Yes, you might need developers or testers or BAs or writers. And, I suggested you think about T-shaped people, those folks who could do whatever it takes to move a feature forward. […]
This is the start of a 5-part series: Hiring for an agile team. Let’s assume you are trying to hire for your agile team. Let’s assume you are in a location where you have candidates to recruit, that there are people looking for jobs in your area. I’ll cover how to hire feature teams elsewhere
I just read Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work. For me, it was a mixed read. Yes, you can make a totally distributed team work. What you need to do: Make all of the work visible Keep everyone focused on one project at a time Keep all of the
Vol 10 #8: When is It Time for a Change? ISSN: 2164-1196 Sept 13, 2013 When Is It Time for a Change? How do you know it’s time for you to make a change? Is your project swimming along–or is it swimming in circles? Is your career humming along? Or is it in low gear?
I was in the midst of an assessment when the CIO came to me, and shut the door. “I have a serious question for you.” I nodded for him to continue. I put aside my papers to show him I was providing him my undivided attention. “I’m thinking of offshoring all the testers. What do
Have you read The STEM Crisis Is a Myth? It’s a fascinating article. Bob actually has data, as opposed to my anecdotal evidence, now and dating back to my article from 2001, Crisis? What Crisis? A Contrarian Perspective. (For those of you who don’t know the four letter acronym, STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and
“George is on his offshoring rampage again,” Cindy said as she slumped down in Ted’s visitor chair. Ted saved his document and turned around. “Oh? Want to tell me about it?” “I need more testers for the feature teams we’re starting, right? I told him. I showed him the project portfolio and the projects we
I just read Social Media is Paralyzing HR. (Hat tip to John Sumser, @JohnSumser who tweeted it.) I sympathize with Paul, who is sympathizing with HR. Let me tell you what I see in too many small to medium size companies: One lonely HR person who is trying to do: All the recruiting for all
If you read my most recent post, Comparing Teams Is Not Useful: Exposing Another Management Myth and the comments, you will see that I rant about the business of normalizing story points for predicting cost or schedule for a program. That led to several comments re SAFe for programs or other frameworks or lifecycles for
One of the top posts on this site is Interview Questions for Project Managers. I bet some of you are interviewing for program managers, too. Here’s a little guidance for how to interview for those jobs. A program manager is a strategic job. Remember, a program is a collection of projects where the business value