Summary: While managing a long project, it’s easy to lose track of progress. And, when that happens, how do you even know whether you’re still making progress? In this article, Johanna Rothman offers suggestions to help you take your project one step at a time and keep it under control. When I coach managers or […]
Summary: Keeping your team busy with work all of the time may seem good for productivity and a good use of your work force. But it comes with serious backlash in the form of delayed work, incomplete iterations, technical debt, and the negative consequences of multitask context switching. In this column, Johanna Rothman explains how
Some agile teams build and maintain their project’s rhythm, happily developing the system. Sure, they may encounter issues–but they can manage those problems and they successfully release the product. No one works overtime, the product owner is happy and the users are happy with the system. Then there are the other teams. I meet many
Have you ever waited weeks for one piece of functionality so you could release a large project? Have you been in the situation where the software is waiting for the hardware? Or where the database admin held up the entire release because his work wasn’t coordinated with the feature-based teams? That’s because you were working
I originally wanted to write about how to start an agile project, possibly the pilot agile project in your organization—if it was starved of resources, people, machines, space, whatever. But I can’t write that article because no advice is worth the space. You shouldn’t even start that project. An important tenet of agile project management
A Small New Year’s Tip: Timebox, Not Scopebox I hope you are all enjoying your holidays. Many people use this time of year to reflect and then make New Year’s resolutions. I’m not one of them. Sure, I reflect, but I rarely make any New Year’s resolutions. I’ve never kept a resolution for more than
I just posted the October Pragmatic Email newsletter, You Can’t Do All the Work. Now What? If you subscribed, you’d have already received today’s…. Have a great New Year’s everyone.
Rant on. There’s a flame-fest on the scrumdevelopment list about the use of “resources” or “people” to describe the human beings on projects. I like “humans” or “human beings” or “people.” And, I actually prefer “resources” to “man-hours.” I can live with “people-hours,” and prefer that to “resource.” I bet you’re a little surprised. I’ve
If you have to make yourself a New Year’s resolution, resolve to be a Passionate Programmer (or a passionate whatever-you-are). Chad Fowler wrote a delightful book, The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development. What Chad doesn’t realize is that you don’t have to be a programmer to read this book. You can
Andy Lester has written a great book about finding a job you love in any market. He thinks it’s just for technical people, but he’s wrong. It’s for anyone who wants to find a job that he or she can love. The first section is all about preparing to interview: knowing what you want in