I facilitated a project management clinic last week at PSL. One of the questions was this: We have a product owner who persists in changing the contents of the sprint during the sprint. This is difficult for us. It costs us to change the content. Okay, this is a huge pain in the tush. It’s […]
I’m giving a talk at Agile 2012, entitled “How Much Will This Project Cost?” It doesn’t seem to matter what life cycle your project has, someone wants you to predict the cost. The problem is, it’s the wrong question. But, that won’t stop people from asking it anyway. People want to know the cost so
I’ve been having some email conversations with some project and program managers turned Scrum Masters. In general here’s how things have proceeded: Their organizations decided agile was a great idea Their organizations decided Scrum was a great idea to implement agile (because they don’t know the difference between Scrum and agile) The teams started working
I have an article posted at InfoQ, Swarming Across Distance. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. You have to think about how to swarm. It’s not always intuitively obvious. Enjoy!
I’ve been talking to people whose management cares about their velocity. “My management wants us to double our velocity.” Or, “My management wants us to do more in a sprint.” Or, “My management wants to know when we will be a hyper-performing team, so they want to know when we will get 12x velocity like
Shane and the participants and I had a great time at the Geographically Distributed Agile Teams workshop last week. We ran a couple of simulations, and here are some of the emails the teams had: Do you have something for us to test yet? We have completed the card Hi again. I didn’t hear back
I’ve had several conversations in email and with clients recently that have all been about this question: “What do we do about our infrastructure?” Either the project or the program has to create/update/upgraded their architecture or automated test infrastructure, pay down technical debt, or somehow do something that’s not part of a story. And, that’s
I’m tech-editing an article for the Agile Journal. I’m having a discussion with the author about the words “productivity” and “throughput.” I believe that what we measure in agile teams is throughput, the number of features through the team over time. I don’t think we measure productivity, the number of features per person or per
I just posted Managing Timezones in Geographically Distributed Agile Teams. I have a funny story to tell about it. I’m in Belgium, getting ready for Belgium Testing Days. This weekend, the US changes to Daylight Savings Time. But Europe doesn’t. So, when do I talk to my husband? My husband and I are suffering by
One of the problems in a geographically distributed team is the dreaded email chain. Someone has a problem and sends an email. Probably late in the day, when he or she is frustrated after pounding on the problem all day, getting nowhere–except more frustrated. Sally sends the email to the project team. I take offense