I’m at the Much Ado About Agile conference this week, in beautiful Vancouver. During lunch one day, one of the conference participants started talking about premature optimization of code. Well, I know a few things about that. When I started to work professionally as a developer, I wrote in assembly language. We had 256 bytes
Lately, I’ve been working with people who say they’ve looked for months to try to find just the right person. I believe them. When I ask where they spend their time, they inevitably say that they spend way too long interviewing people who aren’t quite right. And, it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s
I’ve been meeting people who call their teams distributed. But their teams are dispersed. That is, some team members are in one place, and some team members are in another. In the worst cases, there are separate people all over the world. For example, if you have cross-functional teams in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and
I’ve been working with and discussing agile program management with a bunch of people. One of the big issues is: what do we call certain people at the program level? We need a program manager, someone who sets/explains the program’s vision, develops program-wide release criteria with sponsors, has a way to articulate program status, someone
I’ve been working with teams and been a part of teams my entire work life. Not so much at university, but certainly when I started working professionally. I’ve been confused by what some people claim are self-organizing teams. To me, they don’t look particularly self-organizing. I read Brad Appleton’s excellent series of blog posts on
People often use my network to ask me for back-door references about people I know. Sometimes, I can help. Sometimes, I can’t. If I don’t know someone well enough to provide a reference, I don’t. For example, if I consulted at a client for a few days, I don’t know anyone well enough, other than
If you are hiring people now, you know that there are plenty of great candidates. How do you discover the best of them? Often, great candidates come to your attention because of their networking. That means if you want to be a great hiring manager, you need to pay attention to and cultivate your network.
Matt Gelbwaks posted a great review ofManage Your Project Portfolio on Stickyminds.com. One of the parts I like best is: However, as a journeyman project manager (PM), I would look at the book and dream wistfully of the day in the future when I would need to read it. Don’t you be fooled! This book
It’s been a busy fall in our household. Daughter #1 graduated from university last spring, had a summer job, and landed a real full-time job. She lived with us for a couple of weeks, along with her two roommates, and moved out on Labor Day weekend. Daughter #2 started university just before Labor Day. Mark
I’ve been working with several clients on their transition to agile. Yes, the technical staff needs training. Yes, they often need coaching on how to choose small chunks, estimate and commit to an iteration’s worth of work, and then to deliver that work. And, I am beginning to think the biggest problem in transition is