If you’re thinking about agile or trying to use it, you probably started with iterations in some form. You tried (and might be still trying) to estimate what you can fit into an iteration. That’s called “pushing” work, where you commit to some number of items of work in advance. And, if you have to […]
You might have noticed I have not written as much in this blog for the past couple of months as I normally do. That’s because I’ve been involved in another writing project that’s taken a ton of my time. I’m part of the writing team for the Agile Practice Guide. The Guide is a joint
Agile is iterative and incremental development and frequent delivery with cultural change for transparency. What do the words iterative and incremental mean? Iterative means we take a one-piece-at-a-time for creating an entire feature. Iterative approaches manage the technical risk. We learn about the risk as we iterate through the entire feature set. Incremental means we deliver those
If you are thinking about writing more or better for next year, take a look at my writing workshops. I am offering Writing Workshop 1: Write Non-Fiction to Enhance Your Business and Reputation again, so you can learn how to create a daily writing habit, write in small chunks, and start to publish. I am
I’m doing a Twitter chat November 3 at 4pm Eastern/8pm UK with David Daly. David posted the video of our conversation as prep for the Twitter chat. Today he tweeted this: “How do you optimize for features? That’s flow efficiency.” Yes, I said that. There were several Twitter rants about the use of the word
I started this series writing about the need for coaches in Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 1. I continued in Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 2, talking about the changed role of managers in agile. In this part, let me address the role of senior managers in agile and how coaches might help. For years,
I recently took a vacation in Israel. I had a blast, and I took a lot of great pictures. Back before we had digital cameras, I had an analog camera. It was a good camera—not high-end, but good enough for my purposes. But when I took pictures, I was almost always disappointed by the results.
In Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 1, I wrote about circumstances under which a team might want a coach. It wasn’t an exhaustive list. It had several questions defining when coaches might help the team to become agile, not be cargo cult agile. One of the reasons we might need coaches for a team is because
There was a fascinating Twitter conversation last week when I was busy writing other things. (I also find Twitter to be a difficult-for-me arena to have a conversation. I need more than 140 characters.) The conversation started when Neil Killick tweeted this: orgs need coaches not because “agile is unintuitive”, but because effective sw delivery
In What Agile Project Managers Do, Part 1, I described what facilitative agile project managers do. In What Agile Project Managers Do Not Do, Part 2, I described a number of roles a more traditional project manager might think is their job still, even if they are supposed to be/use agile. Sometimes, people get confused with