Many people use an iteration approach to agile. They decide on an iteration duration, commit to work for that iteration and by definition, they are done at the end of the timebox. I like timeboxing many things. I like timeboxing work I don’t know how to start. I find short timeboxes help me focus on the […]
Own Your Leadership, Part 2 In Own Your Leadership Part 1: Dave and Sherry collaborated on seeing if the team could deliver one feature at a time, to improve the team’s throughput and quality. They had mixed success. The first story took them three full days, instead of their anticipated one day. All the other
One of the things I like about agile is the fact that it encourages me to learn. I wish I were perfect, able to learn things as soon as I try them. However, I am all too human. It takes me time to learn. I just upgraded one of my text-processing programs, and now about
In more traditional projects, PMI has a notion that you can “control” a project. I have never found that to be true. Of course, I never quite used a waterfall approach—I have used feature-driven approaches more often than I used a serial approach. Instead of “control,” I like to think about guiding or steering a
If you only read my blog, you might not know I publish a monthly newsletter, the Pragmatic Manager. The last two issues have been on agile leadership. Take a look at Being An Agile Leader and Own Your Leadership, Part 1. Those newsletters in addition to this 5-part series culminating with Becoming an Agile Leader, Part 5: Learning
I’ve said before that agile is a cultural change, not merely a project management framework or approach. One of the big changes is around transparency and safety. We need safety to experiment. We need safety to be transparent. Creating that safe environment can be difficult for everyone involved. John LeDrew has started a new podcast,
Own Your Leadership, Part 1 Dave is a new team lead. As a team lead, he was supposed to help with his organization’s transition to agile and help the more junior members of his team learn the codebase. His team had several problems: each person worked alone, their one tester was overwhelmed, and he, Dave,
Culture is a combination of three things: how people treat each other, what people can discuss, and what the organization rewards. Team 1 has a project manager who believes in collaboration. She encourages people to move work across the board, regardless of how many people it takes to finish a story. The team members joke
Johnny Beirne over at projectmanagementparadise podcast interviewed me, specifically about my post, Visualize Your Work So You Can Say No. See Episode 38: “How to visualise your work so that you can say no” with Johanna Rothman. Hope you enjoy it!
To summarize: your agile transformation is stuck. You’ve thought about your why, as in Becoming an Agile Leader, Part 1: Define Your Why. You’ve started to measure possibilities. You have an idea of who you might talk with as in Becoming an Agile Leader, Part 2: Who to Approach. You’ve considered who you need as allies and how to enlist them