My friend and colleague, Stever Robbins, has started a blog, and one of his early posts is Are engineers living on another planet? Don’t they use their software? Unfortunately, not always. It takes self-discipline and the desire to look for problems to cause people to create systems that allow them to use their own
I was talking with Don Gray this morning about our work on the AYE Conference. I’m the marketing chair, he’s the program chair. We were discussing the sessions we have so far, and I said we could put one of the management sessions into the team effectiveness track. “No,” Don said, “Managers aren’t part
Via Pragmatic Marketing, this piece on How to use timeboxes for scheduling software delivery.
I am an early reviewer on Esther Derby’s and Diana Larsen’s upcoming book about retrospectives (Pragmatic Bookshelf, sometime this year). Here’s a piece of my feedback that puzzled Esther: “Put those words on weight training!” Her response was “cute, but what do I do?” I laughed out loud on the phone with her. I was
A couple of weeks ago in Positive Results With One-on-Ones, I let you know Esther and I would be running public workshops soon. We are finally ready to announce the workshop. July 10-12, 2006, in Minneapolis, we will hold the first Behind Closed Doors: Managing One-on-One workshop. Interested? Here’s the flyer (PDF). I’ll be
Adam Goucher published his Review of Behind Closed Doors. Adam likes it! Here are the things he particularly likes: the scenario structure of seeing what a great manager does each week; and the techniques that managers (and anyone else) can use to make life easier. Thanks, Adam.
A few weeks ago, I republished an article originally published in Better Software: Convincing Management That Context Switching Is a Bad Idea on the AYE site. I’d received no feedback about the article when it was published, so I wanted to generate some discussion about my ideas. I did generate a little discussion. Don Gray
I was reading Michael Specht’s links of Mar 24, 2006 and found this gem: One Hundred Rules for NASA Project Managers.
Matisse has an interesting post, Software is like Building Construction. He talks about iterative design and the interdependencies of people with deliverables as being common to construction and software. In my opinion, he’s not all wrong, but he’s not all right. I agree that there are plenty of design-build firms who wait until the
Via Keith’s A Few Good Posts by Ed Gibbs, I read Better Feedback Loops With One on Ones. Sounds like one-on-ones are helping Ed and his team. Last week, I had dinner with a manager (also using Scrum) who has had great results with one-on-ones. It’s always nice to hear positive news about a