We’re pretty good at knowing when someone is a good fit for a technical role. But how do we know when someone is ready for technical leadership or management? That’s a lot more difficult, and that’s because leadership or management—at any level—is a different job than working in the technology. Here are some ideas based
Many agile teams and product leaders assume they can make many product decisions on their own. They do have some constraints, such as “this kind of customer” and “these kinds of problems.” However, as the teams work together and explore the product, they assume they can decide on the designs and architecture. Product leaders assume
A project portfolio manager contacted me via LinkedIn. The question: How can this portfolio team start to manage the project portfolio when the organization has 600 projects? Right now, the portfolio team is supposed to read the status decks for each of those 600, to understand each project’s status. How to start? That’s an impossible
My clients all have too much work to do. So they ask the product or project leaders to write a business case for each effort. The clients claim this information helps them decide which work to do and not do. However, everyone knows each business case is at least partially fiction. That’s because the writer
Fred, a client, asked how I could help him get more work out of his resources. I asked if he meant people. He said yes. So I asked if he focused more on what each person did or if he focused on the team’s work. “Each person.” I smiled and said, “I have a deal
Do your senior leaders want more predictability about when your team can finish its work? Perfect prediction is impossible, and sometimes, even reasonable prediction is quite difficult (with apologies to Yogi Berra). However, agile teams have one specific “tool” to create better predictability: right-sizing their stories. When a team right-sizes their work, they can create
Too often, managers support training for everyone except themselves. However, since managers create and refine the culture, management training has an exceptional return for the time and money you invest. These three workshops, based on my Modern Management Made Easy books, will support your practice of management so you can be more effective. I recommend
We use product roadmaps to see where we want to go and the options we might take to get there. Yet, so many of our roadmaps offer only a single and certain destination. If we don’t see options, we reduce our innovation decision points—and possibly disappoint our customers. Worse, we create products that don’t fulfill
Workshop Objective: In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use principles first, to create, support, and improve your successful distributed agile team. Workshop Overview: You’ll learn the eight principles of successful distributed agile teams and how to use them to personalize your team’s success. Learn how to: How the eight principles change the practices. How
Agile product leaders (product managers, product owners, and business analysts) all have one goal: How do I support the team in their quest to deliver better and faster? Product leaders do this by helping the team plan with minimums and continually replan. These two workshops help you do that. I offer two versions: for teams,