Sophie strode down the hall to Randy’s office. “Randy, what is this?” she asked as she waved a sheaf of papers. Randy looked up and said, “I have no idea. What are you waving around?” “Your plans for your group!” “Oh, my predicted project portfolio for the next six months?” “Yes! When were you going
As organizations have transitioned to agile projects and programs, what happens to the managers? Do we need managers any more? If so, what good would they do? Yes, we need managers. And in a truly agile organization, where the managers are freed from the day-to-day tactical project tasks, we need them more than ever as
Last week, when I was on vacation, my most recent Stickyminds column went up. I somehow expected more comments. Maybe other people were on vacation, too?
One of the problems many people encounter when moving to agile is that they (literally) cannot imagine iterations shorter than 4 weeks. I rarely recommend an iteration as long as 4 weeks now, and if people insist on 3 weeks, suggest they find the root cause for the reason their iteration needs to be so
I’ve been working with Gil Broza on our teleclass series, Prevent Your Agile Titanic, both on marketing it and on its content. And it never fails, we have questions for each other almost every day. Sometimes I’m developing something and it looks “funny.” So I ask for review. Sometimes, as with the content, we discuss
Erik Gfesser posted a lovely review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. Thanks, Erik!
Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. Vol 7, #2: Why Do Iterations Have to be the Same Duration in Agile? February 5, 2010 In This Issue: Why Do Iterations Have to be the Same Duration in Agile? Join the Teleseminar Series: Prevent Your Agile Titanic Group Coaching for Managers and Project Managers New to the Pragmatic Manager?
I wrote a little article about Barriers to Agility in the most recent version of PragPub, the online magazine from the Pragmatic Bookshelf. There’s a bunch of other good articles in there, too. Andy Lester has a great article about speaking as a way to practice interviewing, a bunch of comments/thoughts/rants about the iPad, and
I just returned from Tokyo, where I keynoted at JaSST, the Japan Symposium on Software Testing. 10 years ago, when they started the conference, maybe it was just about testing, but now it’s evolved to be about quality in the organization. Some highlights from my trip: Everyone (and everything) I met appeared quite orderly. Everything
I read a lot about speakers practicing authenticity. (Huh?) All the suggestions seem reasonable, yet contrived to me: act interested in your audience, use your current location in your speech, remember to thank people at the end of your speech. If you don’t want to be a speaker, don’t. If you do want to be