I recently took a vacation in Israel. I had a blast, and I took a lot of great pictures. Back before we had digital cameras, I had an analog camera. It was a good camera—not high-end, but good enough for my purposes. But when I took pictures, I was almost always disappointed by the results. […]
In Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 1, I wrote about circumstances under which a team might want a coach. It wasn’t an exhaustive list. It had several questions defining when coaches might help the team to become agile, not be cargo cult agile. One of the reasons we might need coaches for a team is because
There was a fascinating Twitter conversation last week when I was busy writing other things. (I also find Twitter to be a difficult-for-me arena to have a conversation. I need more than 140 characters.) The conversation started when Neil Killick tweeted this: orgs need coaches not because “agile is unintuitive”, but because effective sw delivery
In What Agile Project Managers Do, Part 1, I described what facilitative agile project managers do. In What Agile Project Managers Do Not Do, Part 2, I described a number of roles a more traditional project manager might think is their job still, even if they are supposed to be/use agile. Sometimes, people get confused with
In What Agile Project Managers Do, Part 1, I spoke about what agile project managers might do. Here’s what agile project managers do not do: The agile project manager does not assign work. The agile project manager does not estimate work on behalf of the team. The agile project manager does not commit to features,
One of my colleagues wants to standardize all his agile teams on one process. He happens to like iterations, so he wants everyone to use two-week iterations. He wants them to use Scrum rituals and ceremonies. I understand what he wants to accomplish: gaining the ability to look across the projects and see the same
One of the questions I hear all the time with people transitioning to using agile is this: How do we organize the project if we don’t have a project manager? If you read Manage It!, you know I don’t buy the idea of a controlling project manager. But a facilitative project manager? Oh my. That
What does “scaling agile” mean to you? For me, there are two ways to think about scaling: one is moving from one project to a program. The other is sharing agile across the business. Let’s talk about moving from a one-team project to agile programs. A program consists of several projects across the organization. While
If you’ve been watching my writing (and speaking), you’ve noticed that I like both agile and lean. I like the cadence of milestones and demos that iteration-based agile provides. I like the limiting of work in progress and seeing the whole that lean provides. For me, both are necessary to deliver value. You might have
As I’m teaching my Practical Product Owner workshop, some POs are having trouble understanding how big a defect is. Sure, they want to have small(er) stories, but a defect isn’t done until it’s all fixed, and the team has decided if they need automated regression tests added to the smoke tests. So, here are three