By Lisamarie Babik, and Johanna Rothman – October 23, 2012 If you walk through a high-performing agile team space, you’ll hear a buzz about the product: “Do you see this?” “Bump that.” “Ah ha!” “Tell me more about what you want.” “But that is part of the acceptance criteria.” “We should do it this way.” […]
Do you use Iteration Zero for your agile projects? An Iteration Zero is an iteration where you set up all the servers, make sure you have a release plan, develop a product backlog, and in general do all those things that “assure” you that your project is ready to go. Some agile project managers do,
“Hey, George, I want to talk to you about training for my group,” Andrea said. “Don’t start with that again,” George said. “I know you have a group of developers who need training. Two years ago, when you ran testing, you had a group of testers who needed training. Why do all your groups need
I caught up with Fred, a friend of longstanding, just before what I thought would be his normal two- to three-week vacation in August. “Where are you going this year, Fred? Are you bicycling or white water rafting? Or something else exciting? I can’t wait to live vicariously through you again!” “I’m not going anywhere
Do you have a product owner who doesn’t want to admit to technical debt? “Give me another feature! And another feature! Just keep giving me features! It’s feature time, baby!” Once a product owner has the heady feeling of seeing features one after the other, it’s difficult for that product owner to consider anything other
“Everyone is worth saving. Everyone is worth saving.” Jimmy was muttering under his breath as he walked into my office. “Hi, Steve. I’m here for our one-on-one. I have a real problem.” “OK, let’s hear it.” “Frieda is a problem in my group.” “Jimmy, we have discussed Frieda before. I thought you were going to
We understand how to swarm around a feature as a collocated team. But how do you do that when you are part of a geographically distributed agile team? It depends on how you are distributed and across how many time zones. How are you distributed? Too many geographically distributed teams are separated by function. That
“Hey, Jim, guess what? I incented my agile team to work faster and harder. I told them if they doubled their velocity, I would give them a team bonus. And it worked! In just one iteration, they went from 23 points to 46 points. Is that team a great team, or what?” – a not-so-agile
Imagine this scenario: you want to transition to agile, and you have a geographically dispersed team with people all over the world. You have two developers in the UK and two in Boston, two testers in Portland, Oregon, a product manager in Brazil, and you, the project manager are in Sweden. And, you are pretty
One of the biggest management myths is, “I must treat everyone the same way.” In our organizations, we have career ladders that try to fit us into “ticky-tacky” boxes for promotion, assume that everyone brainstorms the same way, and that everyone likes the same kind of projects. Nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone