I was talking with a project manager the other day. He said, “I don’t have enough developers, testers, or UI people. What am I going to do?” I said, “Well, you have enough people if you have more time. Do you have more time?” He rolled his eyes, and said, “What do you think?” “Then,
I’ve been working with program teams lately, and some of them have issues when they talk about different teams on their programs when they use words such as “headquarters” and “remote” locations. The headquarters teams tell me the remote teams don’t listen to them and the remote teams tell me the headquarters teams don’t hear
A few months ago at Agile Boston, Mike Cottmeyer said that when he looks at teams who want to scale agile, he looks at their ability to create working teams. If they can create teams, they can scale. If they can’t, they have little hope of scaling agile. (Mike, if I’m misquoting you, I’ll correct
A great way to destroy a program is to avoid writing a charter. When I do assessments or work with teams, I often find that programs do not have charters, or that the charter is too big, or is missing some key piece of information. But what do you really need in a charter? Too
Last night, the New England Society of Applied Spectroscopy had an evening of remembrances for Raúl Curbelo. Raúl was a pioneer in the development of spectroscopic instrumentation. I worked for Raúl at Digilab from 1978-1982. I spoke last night. Here is an excerpt of my comments: I can’t speak to the breakthroughs Raúl developed in
The good news is that agile has name recognition. The bad news is that a number of organizations are trying to start agile in a big-bang way, especially on programs. Program management is hard enough without throwing a new approach to projects into the mix. Since so many of you are emailing me about this,
Jonathan Rasmussen wrote a lovely review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. The part I like the best is: If you are looking for advice around what to measure when tracking your projects, how to come up with an actionable mission statement, or just how to effectively communicate the state of your portfolio ask Santa for
My Gantthead.com column has been up for a couple of weeks, but I was too busy traveling to notice :-(. The Silent Project Killer column is up. Enjoy!
I knew I was going to like The Agile Samurai from the first page: Agile is a way of developing software that reminds us that although computers run the code, it’s people who create and maintain it. Jonathan Rasmussen, the Other JR, has written a great, short, to-the-point book about how to move a project
On the bike at the gym this morning, I thought about increasing my level. When I exercise, more friction is good. But when you develop or use products, more friction is bad. Brian Marick talks about this when he speaks and writes about “ease” for development teams. If you’ve encountered a web page that made