Last week at SD Best Practices, I led an experiential half-day session about coaching. A significant number of the participants thought their job was to teach the other person what to do. (I think one person actually said “lead them to enlightenment.”) While it may be true in sports or school coaching, peer-to-peer coaching
I’m writing the project management book. I’m noting that sometimes PMs (and teams) perform activities that have no lasting useful effect on the project. One example is doing estimation with feedback. If you estimate but never check reality against those estimates, that’s an example of “mental masturbation: it feels good but there’s no lasting
So, if you were looking for a developer or a tester or a business analyst (or a whatever role) for your agile team, what qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills might that person have? And, is there a way to recognize those characteristics in a resume? Here’s a potential list of qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills.
I read RadioShack employees get pink slip via e-mail and at first thought I must have read it wrong. I was stunned to think that anyone would think an email notification of a layoff was acceptable. What were the managers thinking?
As Esther says in her fine comment, There are lots of ways to do all these things — and sometimes teams do all the “practices” but still don’t meet the principles. Exactly. And it’s very hard to see the principles under the project when you’re reviewing a resume.Here’s a statement I’ve seen on lots of
Once you’ve seen some evidence of a lifecycle, look for the practices the candidate has used on projects. To be honest, I can imagine seeing one or two of these on a resume; certainly not all. Test-driven development (likely to be on a resume) Unit testing (likely to be on a resume) Pair programming (likely
I spoke with a recruiter yesterday about how to hire people for an agile team. Her client had suggested she look for people with XP experience, and that candidates have “stand-up meetings” on their resume. Oh no. Looking for agile people is much more than keywords.If you’re recruiting for an agile team member, first, decide
This is a little off topic, but it’s a big deal to me 🙂 We hit a major milestone this week. Daughter #1 is off to school. (For my non-US readers, that means university.) We have just one daughter at home, who starts high school this week. Sending a child to school is not like
I’m in the midst of writing the PM book (which is why I haven’t blogged much). One of my tips is that projects have both requirements and goals–and that the PM (at least) needs to know the difference. A requirement can be a use case, user story, a shall statement, whatever. So can a