I spoke at AgileIndyConf last week. I had a blast. Met lots of great people from Indianapolis, got to hang with people like Christopher Avery (@christopheraver), Ron Jeffries (@ronjeffries), Chet Hendrickson (@chethendrickson), Angela Harms (@angelaharms), Mike Kelly (@ michael_d_kelly), Joe Astolfi (@joeastolfi), and many more. (If I missed you, please add yourselves in the comments
I have another article posted on InfoQ: What Scrum Master Are You Hiring? I’ve noticed that many organizations are calling certain positions Scrum Masters, and they might be Scrum Masters, but to me, they are anything but. You need to do a job analysis first, and name the position second. This is all about cultural
Finding the Geek Who Fits: Five Tips for Hiring as an Agile Team is up in this month’s PragPub magazine. My colleague, Andy Lester, has an article, Being the Geek Who Fits: Don’t Forget That You’re Interviewing Them, Too. You could read the entire magazine… It’s quite good. I hope you enjoy it. You can comment
I’m at AgileIndyConf today and tomorrow. Today, I’m leading a tutorial about Agile Project Management. Tomorrow is my keynote about Agile Management. And, that got me thinking about agile management, again. To be a great agile manager, you need to be a servant leader. Okay, you understand that part. To be a great servant leader,
In Organizing an Agile Program: Part 1, Introduction, I discussed the difference between hierarchies and networks. I used Scrum of Scrums as an example. It could be any organizing hierarchy. Remember, I like Scrum as a way to organize a project team’s work. I also like lean. I like XP. I like unbranded agile. I
If you have not gathered data about your hiring activities, consider doing so. I find it useful to see how well I’m doing. This is especially important if you can’t find people and you want to know why. For data about recruiting and selection, look at your different recruiting strategies, and for each strategy, record:
Prepare to Become More Influential When you want to make a change, you need other people to work with you. Maybe you want your organization to transition to agile. Maybe it’s time to experiment with measuring your work in progress. Maybe you want to move from manual testing to a combination of automated testing plus
Want to ask me questions about anything agile? Are you available Thursday Feb 28 at 12:30 pm Eastern? We’re doing our first Online AgileConnection MeetUp. Since it’s the first, and we don’t know what you want, we thought we’d do a lean startup approach to it. We’re doing questions-and-answers. I’ve noticed lately that when I
There’s a great article that George Dinwiddie pointed me to, If There’s a Gap, Blame It on the Employer. It’s a nice companion piece to John Sumser’s entire series, Skills Gap: The Series. Here’s what this means for people in technology: Hire based on how well people fit into your team. Yes, this is cultural
If you want to organize an agile program, so you can manage the stream of features in your agile program, you have some options. It depends on the size of your program. The communication structures in your agile program matter. How Large Is Your Agile Program? I think of programs as small, medium, and large.