Recently, I spoke with a hiring manager. He wanted to make sure a person he thought was overqualified for a position stayed in the job for two years. (!!) He was asking candidates to commit to his job for two years in the interview process. If an organization can commit to a candidate for two
Why Multitasking Doesn’t Work In the last Pragmatic Manager, Start Small, I explained how to start small, and invited you to email me if you were trying to multitask among several projects, but couldn’t make it work. Several of you did. In this Pragmatic Manager, I’m going to walk you through what happens and the
“I want to move to agile. Or lean. I don’t know which. I just know I have to show progress more often. I want to be able to adapt to changing conditions. That means I have to choose between timeboxes or Kanban, right?”– a confused project manager, on the verge of adopting a more agile
A colleague was looking for a way to move toward agile but not really transition all the way. “I don’t think we’re ready for two- or three-week iterations,” he said. “We want to move a little more slowly than that. But, we do want to do something more agile than waterfall. And, we want to
I often receive emails from readers asking questions such as “We have ten developers and two testers. How do we compare to our industry?”; “We have six-week iterations and a two-month hardening iteration at the end of our release. How agile are we?”; “We finish twelve stories in a four-week iteration. How many stories do
Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. Vol 7, #5: 2010’s Small New Year’s Eve Tip: Start With Small Steps December 31, 2010 In This Issue:2010’s Small New Year’s Eve Tip: Start Small Thinking About Training in 2011? Manage Your Project Portfolio 2010’s Small New Year’s Eve Tip: Start Small I hope you are enjoying
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