A number of my clients are attempting to use agile as they transition from a strict waterfall to a more adaptive approach to their projects. One problem the change artists have is this: The managers, product managers, and maybe even the customers want to define all the requirements up front. I have not found the […]
Feeling Alone on Your Agile Journey? Do you feel as if you are waving the agile flag and no one cares? You know what you, your team, and your management needs to do. No one seems to be able to put your suggestions into practice. Worse, sometimes, it looks as if no one cares, except
I’ve lost count of the number of companies that don’t pay for training—or even provide tuition reimbursement. I also see too many organizations decide whom to hire based on technical skills. They don’t see the irony here. That means you’re responsible for your ongoing career development. And here’s the kicker: The more you learn and
Here’s something I see in many organizations: Management wants to “control and manage” the projects/efforts/work (whatever they call it) in the same way they did before the organization started agile. They want Gantt charts. They want commitments. They want assurances that the work will proceed in the same way they thought of it before the
In Stuck in the Middle, Part 1, I discussed possible management problems with agile. Those aren’t the only stuck problems I see. Sometimes, I see team problems. What if the teams are “almost agile”—they still have too many experts, their stories are too big, they don’t always deliver value on a regular basis? You know
In part 1, I addressed some management challenges with an agile transition. In part 2, I addressed some team issues. In this part, I’ll discuss why agile is a culture change and ways to consider a system change to agile. Agile looks something like this image. The responsible person (often called a product owner)
For many people, agile means an end to all project management. I disagree. I find value in servant leadership in project management. I explain how you can think about servant leadership and agile project management in my projectmanagement.com column this month: Servant Leadership: The Agile Way. If you are looking to increase your servant leadership
In more traditional projects, the Project Management Institute 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. But the idea that I could somehow control a
Over on Techwell, my monthly column is Agile Does Not Equal Scrum: Know the Difference. I wrote the article because I am tired of people saying “Agile/Scrum” as if Scrum was the only way to do agile. I use iterations, kanban, and the XP technical practices when I work with teams. I am not religious about
I met a team recently who was concerned about their velocity. They were always “too late” according to their manager. I asked them what they measured and how. They measured the burndown for each iteration. They calculated the number of points they could claim for each story. Why? Because they didn’t always finish the stories they