You have your lists from What Culture Do You Want in a New Job, Part 1. That means you have six lists: Three things you enjoyed talking about at work Three things you shook your head about, or made you say, “Huh, what is going on here?” Three things that you enjoyed about how the
How Effective Are You? A colleague emailed me, asking me how she could tell if her staff was effective. She had developed a few metrics. But her gut was telling her she was looking at the wrong data. She was right. She was looking at the wrong data. Her managers wanted to know how effective
One of the things I suggest in Manage Your Job Search is to think about your culture when or before you start interviewing. How do you do that? An organization’s culture is made of these three things: What’s okay to talk about? How do you treat people? What do you reward? You can’t just ask
One of the challenges in a program is how you manage the checkins, especially if you have continuous integration. I am quite fond of continuous integration, no matter how large your program is. I also like short iterations. (Remember Short is Beautiful?) But imagine a product where you have a platform and layers. I’m separating
Your interview questions and your auditions should sell people on working for you. It’s that simple. You don’t need to sell people on working for your company. When I teach interviewing, that’s what I teach. And, every single time, my workshop participants roll their eyes and don’t believe me until we start crafting their interview
Imagine you are transitioning to agile. You are a program manager, with a couple of agile projects, and a couple of traditional projects. How do you manage the program? Here’s what a program team looks like. For the sake of argument, assume that Sally is an agile program manager, because we can tell she’s working
“I need a little breathing room in my group,” Carl said to Steve. “I have fifteen people reporting directly to me, and you and I both know that’s way too many. I need to promote somebody, but I’m having a little trouble deciding who to promote.” Carl shook his head as he looked at his
If you follow the Agile Journal, you know that it was hacked beyond repair last fall. I was quiet about wanting more articles. But now, the site is up and ready for business. Go look at agileconnection.com. I wrote a column about how things have changed in From Agile Journal to Agile Connection: A Look
One of the best things about the comments on my Vistage blog post is that they are getting my juices flowing. I’ve already stated I don’t like assessments, that I prefer auditions. See Creating Auditions for Senior Managers for more details. The question about current industry standard for cultural fit got me thinking. I don’t
If you’re trying to select a manager, you want one who fits your organization. I hope you’ve read my blog post over at Vistage. If you read the comments, you see I’m not into surveys or psychometric assessments. BTW, I find it useful for me to know about myself, but not for others to use