A few months ago at Agile Boston, Mike Cottmeyer said that when he looks at teams who want to scale agile, he looks at their ability to create working teams. If they can create teams, they can scale. If they can’t, they have little hope of scaling agile. (Mike, if I’m misquoting you, I’ll correct […]
Another key piece of culture is understanding a candidate’s background and preferences around rewards: what do you reward, how do you reward, and when. Let me be clear: I am not discussing what the organization should and should not reward here, although I have plenty of opinions. I am discussing how to detect what the
A great way to destroy a program is to avoid writing a charter. When I do assessments or work with teams, I often find that programs do not have charters, or that the charter is too big, or is missing some key piece of information. But what do you really need in a charter? Too
I bet you’ve seen teams like this: people are quiet, reserved and thoughtful. They discuss issues in moderated respectful tones and words. And, I bet you’ve seen teams whose favorite word is “brain-dead” when discussing ideas or people, who seem to need to have high volume discussions, and are loud. I bet you’ve seen teams
Dave’s comments on my most recent post got me thinking about doing a series of posts about interviewing for cultural fit. In my recent talks about management, I talk about cultural fit. One piece of cultural fit is knowing what you can discuss and not discuss. When you interview people, especially managers, you can’t ask,
Last night, the New England Society of Applied Spectroscopy had an evening of remembrances for Raúl Curbelo. Raúl was a pioneer in the development of spectroscopic instrumentation. I worked for Raúl at Digilab from 1978-1982. I spoke last night. Here is an excerpt of my comments: I can’t speak to the breakthroughs Raúl developed in
The good news is that agile has name recognition. The bad news is that a number of organizations are trying to start agile in a big-bang way, especially on programs. Program management is hard enough without throwing a new approach to projects into the mix. Since so many of you are emailing me about this,
Jonathan Rasmussen wrote a lovely review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. The part I like the best is: If you are looking for advice around what to measure when tracking your projects, how to come up with an actionable mission statement, or just how to effectively communicate the state of your portfolio ask Santa for
My Gantthead.com column has been up for a couple of weeks, but I was too busy traveling to notice :-(. The Silent Project Killer column is up. Enjoy!
You may have noticed my most recent post was back in October (ouch). That’s because of the past 6 weeks, I’ve been out of town 5. With that much travel, something has to go, and some of my blogging is it. In any case, I hadn’t stopped thinking about hiring issues, I just momentarily stopped