I just finished the SDC conference in Wellington and am now in Sydney, ready to start SDC here tomorrow morning. One of the highlights for me was the experiential workshop Shane Hastie and I led about kanban Tuesday afternoon. We started with a backlog and a minimal board: not started, in process with a WIP
I’m in Las Vegas waiting to get on a plan to Los Angeles to go to New Zealand for SDC. I led a workshop yesterday for real estate project managers about how to define success and manage some of the early-in-the-project risks. We discussed issues such as the Hudson Bay start, context-free questions, release criteria,
It’s easy to hire for a “normal” kind of job, where you say, “Developer” and everyone knows what you mean. But what if you are looking for a new kind of role, say, “knowledge management” or “social media guru”? Those roles are new. They mean different things to different people. Well, if you’re like my
Shane Hastie and I have been working across timezones in preparation for a workshop: Working Effectively With Distributed Agile Teams. I’m keynoting at SDC in a couple of weeks, and am looking forward to being back in Wellington and Sydney. First, Shane and I built a backlog in Google docs, so we could both see
For years, I have ranted against traffic lights as a way to discuss project status. That’s because on serial lifecycle projects, or on long projects, the traffic light was always yellow or red. And, because managers, especially senior managers expected the light to turn green by itself with no outside intervention. But Lisa Crispin noted
I still have estimation on the mind. I saw The Impact of Accidental Complexity on Estimates and I was wondering about the effect of management on bad code. Do managers sometimes force developers to write bad code by allowing technical debt? Jay’s third point implicates technical debt as a cause: Introducing technical debt increases accidental
I’ve been reading Pfeffer’s Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t and enjoying it a lot. I’ve had a few aha moments, and one has to do with networking for a new job. Here’s a quote: Consequently, an optimal networking strategy is to know a lot of different people from different circles, have
I did decide to talk about how we got started on 100% utilization and what to do about it. I didn’t say everything I wanted to say, so here is what I wish I’d said: How 100% Utilization Got Started Back in the early days of computing, machines were orders of magnitude more expensive than
After returning from one of the dinners in Brussels at Belgium Testing Days, Mieke Gievers, one of the organizers said, “I don’t think people have the same passion about their jobs. They just want more money.” I, of course, disagreed. The reasons people want money is that organizations have broken the implicit social contract to
I’m at Belgium Testing Days, and in about 90 minutes, I’ll be giving a lightning talk as part of a keynote. I love lightning talks because I love to talk and I love the challenge of a 5-minute, go-for-broke, get-it-organized, and do-it. And, it’s an excuse to drink a lot of cold caffeine in preparation.