The December Harvard Business Review has an article, Is the Rookie Ready? (You have to subscribe and pay to read the whole thing.) The story is this: Kristen is the new project manager, reporting to Tim. The old PM left because Tim, who’d been her manager for 6 months didn’t know how to work with […]
I’ve been talking with a colleague who is looking for a job. He’s comparing two senior engineering jobs. At one interview, it was clear that the manager makes all the technical decisions. No, the manager doesn’t code anymore; he makes all the technical decisions though, for a 12-person group. At the other job, it looked
Agile approaches work for projects. Have you considered how to make agile work for a program? A program is composed of several projects, typically across the organization. Each of the sub-projects delivers value. But the real value to the organization is when all of the projects deliver results in a synchronized fashion. Since agile approaches
Daniel wrote a lovely post, Kill, commit, or transform your projects over on praglife. Keeping projects around that are not staffed, multitasking on several projects (committing to none of them), and running away from reality doesn’t help anyone. The projects don’t finish faster–they finish, if at all, slower. The people don’t have a sense of
Summary: As a lead and manager, your job to remove obstacles that impede work is most important. But of all the obstacles you find, whether they be people’s perceptions, bottlenecks in the work flow, or an ill-fitted chair or desk, which do you tackle first? Johanna Rothman has cleared countless of obstacles for numerous teams.
Summary: Your developers are already working feature-by-feature in iterations, but your testers are stuck with manual tests. How do you make the leap to agile testing when the nature of agile’s iterative releases challenges testers to test working segments of a product instead of the complete package? In this week’s column, Johanna Rothman explains that
Summary: If you’ve been tasked with creating an agile team, first consider what differentiates an agile team from a non-agile team. In this week’s column, Johanna Rothman highlights six behaviors of people on successful agile teams that candidates for an agile team should possess. Are agile team members different from people on other teams? Yes
Agile projects, especially if you are starting your agile transition, can have plenty of problems. Some are technical debt problems, such as the build taking too long or having insufficient automated tests to know if your changes are helping or hurting the system. But there’s another insidious management problem when many teams transition to agile:
Summary: If you’re a test manager–or any sort of manager, for that matter–in a company that’s transitioning to agile, you might be curious about where you stand in the new environment. Many of the traditional management roles are gone, but managers still have their place. As Johanna Rothman explains, it’s time to think about coaching,
If you are anything like me, you have a to-do list a mile long. Because I work for myself, I have an integrated list of everything I need to do: projects for clients, books to write, articles to write, columns to write, presents to buy, house maintenance, clothes to organize, office cleanup. The list is