While a pandemic might bring out the best and the worst of us, scams persist. I received an email this morning from a so-called “self-publishing” company. They are quite happy to help me get my book to traditional publishers. They didn’t say what it would cost, but they wanted the pdf of the interior and […]
Three Tips to Move from Agile in Name Only to Real Agility Several of you have written to me, asking about the problems you see. Your managers focus on certifications, practices, and vanity metrics—not real agility. The managers don’t understand how agility can help them. You see cargo cult agile. You worry that agility is
All companies appear to be grappling with their approach to diversity and inclusion in the organization. Many have appointed Chief Diversity Officers. However, when you appoint a Chief Anything Officer, you decline responsibility for that thing yourself. I’ve seen this in Quality, Excellence, you name it. When you name a Chief <something> Officer, you no
In a conversation about product quality, the product owner said, “If the testers found the problems faster, we would be done faster.” The tester said, “If the developers didn’t put so many problems in, we’d be done by now.” The developer said, “If you didn’t pressure me so much, I could have done a better
I encourage managers to delegate work. When managers insert themselves into the middle of the work, these problems occur: Managers slow the team down. Managers prevent people from learning. Managers don’t do their management work. That environment creates problems for everyone. Then I read Elisabeth Hendrickson’s original Delegation is Overrated. (She has removed the original
We’ve all heard of big organizations where the top management said, “No need to ever be back in the office. Work from home, as long as you want.” And, the Wall Street Journal has this article, Business Travel Won’t Be Taking Off Soon Amid Coronavirus (you might need to subscribe to see the article). (I
Every organization has policies of some sort. The smaller the organization, the fewer policies you might have. And, the larger the organization, the more policies you might think you need. I keep encountering policies that prevent people from delivering the outcomes the organization wants. Worse, the policies destroy trust. Why have policies anyway? We often
In the agile and lean communities, we talk a lot about transparency. This image is the transparency principle we used in From Chaos to Distributed Agile Teams. I see the most product and program success when the various teams create transparency between them, the middle of the continuum. That’s the full-product transparency. I see many
I’ve seen several cases of process standardization recently. Those processes don’t translate to the current context. The processes don’t have sufficient agility to deliver the necessary results. Yet, people who want to use agile approaches don’t want to apply agile thinking to their processes. Some clients want to create their custom agile process— and then
Work From Home? Three Ideas for Better Project Agility Samantha, an agile manager, had a big problem. Back before everyone had to work from home, they had pretty good results with their standard agile approach. However, now that this eight-person team worked from home, they had these problems: The team didn’t share the same work