I’ve been traveling for the past three weeks (one more to go), and heard one manager say, “With good people, you can deliver almost anything.” He’s right. And it’s hard to define good people. Saying, “I’ll know one when I see one” is not enough. That’s shot-in-the-dark job analysis. Job analysis, even if you don’t […]
One of my clients said to me, “There’s no one who doesn’t need a boss.” He meant it as “Everyone needs someone to check with, to make sure they’re headed in the right direction.” I agree.
I’ve encountered a number of projects where people didn’t know the context of their work. As developers, they were working on the thing they had to develop or fix today. They might remember what they had done yesterday, but there was no sense that they knew what they needed to do tomorrow, or that they
I facilitated a management problem-solving session at the STARWest conference yesterday. When I was debriefing the activities, one participant said he’s met a bunch of testers and test managers who had a “siege” mentality. He was surprised by that. I’m still surprised when I meet people like that. I sometimes see developers who feel
I’m thrilled to be going back to the Softed folks (in Wellington, Auckland, and Sydney) who are doing a project management conference next March. I’m working out with them what topics I’ll be covering. I have a 3-hour workshop in the afternoon. It’s enough time to cover a couple of topics with interactions and
Based on my Reviewing Resumes for an Agile Team posts, I wrote a column for Stickyminds, Recognizing Agile Candidates. You can leave comments there or here.
Keith Ray, Dale Emery, and I are writing books. Keith and Dale are tracking their writing with spreadsheets. Dale is posting his progress online. You can see his Oct 8 progress.I decided they were on to something, and start tracking my progress in a spreadsheet also. I have about 35,000 words written. I have about
At the SD conference a few weeks ago, a colleague asked me this question. (I’m using the Myers-Briggs terminology:If you’re wondering, I often describe introverts as people who need to think in order to speak, and extaverts as people who need to speak in order to think.) Well, the answer is Yes and No. If
A colleague asked me what to do when you’re in an iteration and you realize that the story you’re working on spawns other requirements. I suggested that the person add them to the product backlog (the backlog of everything you want to do for the product) and re-rank the requirements in preparation for the next
So after I posted the Probabilistic Scheduling post, I was working merrily away. I had made some small progress on the book, but was still finishing up other things. Finally, Wednesday I had cleared the entire day to work on the book. I was having trouble with one chapter, so I decided to make