I posted my slides from my keynote from Belgium Testing Days 2012 at slideshare.net. The keynote was “QA or Test? Does it Matter? You Bet it Does!” I hope you enjoy it. “This person has more stories and may be funnier in person than the slides appear to be.”
Register now, before the end of the day, March 15, for the best single-person and team rates for Shane Hastie’s and my Working Effectively In Geographically Distributed Agile Project Teams. If you don’t subscribe to my email newsletter, the Pragmatic Manager, you have missed a number of great issues where I discussed how to solve
Building or Maintaining Agility in Geographically Distributed Teams By now, with all of my tips, you have a good idea about how to start a project with your geographically distributed team. You have a project charter. You have a timezone bubble chart. That helps everyone see where people are in the world. Those two things help
Managing Timezones in Geographically Distributed Agile Teams Your managers have asked you to start a project with people all over the world. What’s the first thing you might do? Draw a bubble chart of time zone dispersion to visualize your time zones to see who is where and offset by how much. I bet that
I just posted Managing Timezones in Geographically Distributed Agile Teams. I have a funny story to tell about it. I’m in Belgium, getting ready for Belgium Testing Days. This weekend, the US changes to Daylight Savings Time. But Europe doesn’t. So, when do I talk to my husband? My husband and I are suffering by
Erran Carmel and Alberto Espinosa have written a gem of a book for anyone trying to work in a geographically distributed team: I’m Working While They’re Sleeping: Time Zone Separation Challenges and Solutions. They first start with an introduction to time zones, and explain why I am so confused when I travel. Everyone moves to
Micromanagement is Not Transparency! Do you want to know what your geographically distributed team is doing? Maybe your team has a sticky-card wall. Or a kanban board. And, maybe they post pictures of it on their wiki. Or, maybe they use a tool and talk about their status in their standup meetings. And, maybe because
One of the problems in a geographically distributed team is the dreaded email chain. Someone has a problem and sends an email. Probably late in the day, when he or she is frustrated after pounding on the problem all day, getting nowhere–except more frustrated. Sally sends the email to the project team. I take offense
One of the biggest management myths is, “I must treat everyone the same way.” In our organizations, we have career ladders that try to fit us into “ticky-tacky” boxes for promotion, assume that everyone brainstorms the same way, and that everyone likes the same kind of projects. Nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone
Back at OOP 2012, I gave a talk called “Six Behaviors to Consider When Hiring for an Agile Team.” These are all team-based, interpersonal skills that any team needs, but are critical on an agile team: collaboration; how to stop when something is good enough–especially when the customer says so; how to ask for help,