Dave, the CIO, strode down the hall to Sarah’s office. Sarah’s the delivery services manager. He walked in, carefully closed the door, and sat down. “Sarah, we need to talk. I don’t like the ship you’re running here. Everyone leaves between 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. They just walk out! How can you expect to […]
Janet hesitated before going down the hall to David’s office. She turned around and sat back down and sighed. Steve stopped by her cubicle and said, “What’s wrong?” “I have this problem and I need to ask David a question. I’m really stumped. But he’s going to tell me, ‘Don’t bring me a problem without
Imagine you are transitioning to agile. You are a program manager with a few agile projects and a traditional project. How do you manage the program? Possible Technical Program with Communities of Practice Above is my drawing of what a technical program team looks like. Sally’s project is actually a small program itself. Sally is
“Juliet, I really screwed up big time. What am I going to do?” Romeo moaned as he plunked himself down in his VP’s office. “I can tell you, but I can’t admit it to my people. They will never respect me again.” “If they discover what you did—and they will—they will never forgive you if
If you have an agile project larger than two or three feature teams, you have an agile program. A program is a collection of projects where the objective is one business deliverable. If you’ve managed programs before, you know how difficult it is to keep programs on track. With bigness comes more risk. One of
“I need a little breathing room in my group,” Carl said to Steve. “I have fifteen people reporting directly to me, and you and I both know that’s way too many. I need to promote somebody, but I’m having a little trouble deciding who to promote.” Carl shook his head as he looked at his
Note: I wrote this article in 2011. It was published in 2012. I hope at some point this article will be wrong. I hear all the time from people that “Agile has crossed the chasm. Agile is everywhere. Agile has made inroads to every organization, to every industry, yes, to every type of software development.
“We have mandatory all-hands meeting this afternoon. I’m going to have a stomachache then,” David said. “What do you mean?” Jenny asked. “You haven’t even had lunch yet. How do you know? What are you talking about?” “Look, you know what our wonderful division head, Martin, is going to say. He’s not going to take
“You know, if you want something done, you just have to do it yourself,” Clive muttered as he strode down to his office. Susan looked up from her desk and sighed. She stood, followed Clive down the hall, and knocked on his office door. “What? I’m a little busy right now!” he replied and turned
“It’s time for our annual management meeting to rank everyone in engineering,” Don, the VP started to explain to his three directors. “Hold on a minute,” interrupted Dave, the development director. “We didn’t do this last year, because we explained we can’t be objective and it makes no sense. We thought we eliminated this nonsense.”