Barry bustled into Sam’s office. “Hey Sam, I need to see how these teams are doing— compared to each other. How do you compare teams?” “I don’t compare teams,” said Sam. “Why are you trying to compare teams?” “So I can tell who’s being more productive and who’s slacking off,” Barry replied. “But I thought […]
Every so often, managers want to compare teams. You’ve heard this in several ways: Managers want teams to “normalize” their story points, so they can better predict the cost or schedule for the rest of the backlog in large programs. This doesn’t work, but managers want to do it anyway. Managers want to compare teams
I just completed writing a series on agile recruiting for Dice.com. Here are all the posts: What is Agile Anyway? How Tech Teams Manage Workload in Agile What the Heck is Kanban? Agile Culture and Recruiting–Hiring Geeks That Fit Five W’s of Agile Recruiting I hope you enjoy these posts. Tell all your recruiter friends!
Are you going to Agile 2013? If you are, maybe these tips will help you. Consider using the schedule planner app to remind you of the sessions you thought you wanted to attend. However, don’t be bound to those sessions. You might meet someone in the hall, or at a meal, have a conversation, and
Are too many job descriptions over-specifying what they need? I read these two posts: Shooting Ourselves in the Foot Isn’t an Effective Engagement Strategy and Top 3 Hiring Mistakes to Avoid. Both posts discuss poor job analysis. This is the issue of How Many Essential Skills Do You Require? Over-specifying a job is bad management and
Creating Change That Lasts Do you want to make a change that lasts, a change that sustains itself over time? Maybe a change such as transitioning to agile? Some of you have made agile work for one team, and are wondering how to make it work for larger programs. Some of you might want to
A few weeks ago, Dave Prior interviewed me for Projects at Work. He posted that interview as a podcast. Yes, registration is required. We spoke about Personal Kanban, my process for getting my work to done, how I carve out time for intellectual work, how I protect that time, how I iterate on my work,
My most recent column on projectmanagement.com, Using Release Trains to Get on Track is up. It’s another one of those columns that addresses the question, “What do you do in a program with agile and non-agile projects?” I hope you enjoy it.
Sally, the project manager, strode confidently into her meeting with John, the CIO. She’d reviewed the roadmap with the product owner and had discussed the risks with the project team. She was sure, based on the first few iterations, that the project was off to a good start. Sure, she knew that projects rarely stayed
One problem when you have a program with agile projects and non-agile projects is how to marry the two parts. The agile projects deliver value every couple of weeks. The non-agile projects? Well, it’s possible they don’t deliver value for months to years. In Managing Programs with Agile and Traditional Projects, I suggested that you