Inez has a great review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. What resonated with me was: this book gives a more complete view of what is at stake when dealing with project portfolio management and will really help organisations to move forward faster with implementing and improving this key business issue of the 21st century, the
My column on Stickyminds is up: Measure Throughput, Not Utilization. Enjoy!
I’m at the Much Ado About Agile conference this week, in beautiful Vancouver. During lunch one day, one of the conference participants started talking about premature optimization of code. Well, I know a few things about that. When I started to work professionally as a developer, I wrote in assembly language. We had 256 bytes
I’ve been meeting people who call their teams distributed. But their teams are dispersed. That is, some team members are in one place, and some team members are in another. In the worst cases, there are separate people all over the world. For example, if you have cross-functional teams in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and
I’ve been working with and discussing agile program management with a bunch of people. One of the big issues is: what do we call certain people at the program level? We need a program manager, someone who sets/explains the program’s vision, develops program-wide release criteria with sponsors, has a way to articulate program status, someone
I’ve been working with teams and been a part of teams my entire work life. Not so much at university, but certainly when I started working professionally. I’ve been confused by what some people claim are self-organizing teams. To me, they don’t look particularly self-organizing. I read Brad Appleton’s excellent series of blog posts on
Matt Gelbwaks posted a great review ofManage Your Project Portfolio on Stickyminds.com. One of the parts I like best is: However, as a journeyman project manager (PM), I would look at the book and dream wistfully of the day in the future when I would need to read it. Don’t you be fooled! This book
It’s been a busy fall in our household. Daughter #1 graduated from university last spring, had a summer job, and landed a real full-time job. She lived with us for a couple of weeks, along with her two roommates, and moved out on Labor Day weekend. Daughter #2 started university just before Labor Day. Mark
I’ve been working with several clients on their transition to agile. Yes, the technical staff needs training. Yes, they often need coaching on how to choose small chunks, estimate and commit to an iteration’s worth of work, and then to deliver that work. And, I am beginning to think the biggest problem in transition is
I’ve been working on agile program management and a colleague emailed me about his program. He’s having trouble seeing how to do agile on a large program. The customer wants to see a working system before they add the features, so the customer thinks the program need to provide “all” the architecture, with some hard-coded