Many people draw distinctions between people who do management-kind of work and people who do “individual contributor” kind of work. I’ve been asking if they mean individual work or team member work. Sometimes, they do mean individual work. More often, they mean team member. Our culture shapes our language. (And, our language shapes our culture.) […]
During Agile 2018, Jerry Weinberg died. Shane Hastie and I had already agreed to do a recording of some sort while at the conference. We invited Esther Derby and turned our time into a lovely podcast about Remembering Jerry Weinberg. Yes, I was quite emotional. I’m human. I wrote a post about some of my
Project advances might be rare. However, you can take advantage of seeing the conditions to create your advance. I’m at the Agile 2018 conference this week. Yesterday, I was scheduled to deliver my Agile and Lean Roadmapping talk at 10:45 am. However, the room was full 15 minutes in advance. I checked with the volunteers—yes, they
Many organizations plan to create certainty, guarantees of some variety. What if we thought about agile planning as a way to manage uncertainty? When I look at long roadmaps with all the “must-do” feature sets and the pressure managers put on teams to commit to delivery, I wonder about this question: How well do we
You might remember I’m working on a book with Mark Kilby. It’s From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver. We just published a new version of the book. We rearranged the entire book. In this version, we added a chapter called “Avoid Chaos with Insufficient Hours of Overlap.” That one chapter might
I’m working on my roadmapping talk for Agile 2018. I finally had the transforming idea about how to position the talk: Roadmapping and product planning are about feedback loops. The shorter the feedback loop, the faster and more often we can learn. That feedback loop works in at least these ways: The faster we learn,
I had the chance to talk with Andy Kaufman on his podcast, Accelerating Your Agile Journey, PPP 2017. We’ve had the chance to speak informally and more formally on his podcast. This time, we had a wide-ranging discussion. We spoke about many of the ideas in Create Your Successful Agile Project: Learning early (instead of failing
Do estimates make you slightly crazed? Maybe you want to roll your eyes at the organization’s confusion between your estimate (guess) and a commitment. You’re not alone. I wrote an article about estimation, How to give IT project estimates—and when not to estimate at all. If you’ve ever struggled with estimating work, give it a read.
I explained about objectives and the differences between MBOs and OKRs in Part 1. I’m tackling the issues of “accountability” in this part. Examine Accountability What does accountability mean to you? I’m serious about that question. For many people—managers included—people are accountable when we can blame them for not doing something. If you don’t achieve
I have personal and professional goals. Sometimes, I state them as objectives: complete this book, learn that thing. Those are personal objectives. My personal objectives look like MBOs, Management By Objectives. These personal objectives contribute to my company, but they are not a corporate objective. Some of my goals are corporate objectives: release that book, build