Ron Jeffries, Matt Barcomb, and several other people wrote an interesting thread about prescriptive and non-prescriptive approaches to team-based agile. The issues are nuanced and for me, don’t lend themselves to a Twitter discussion. (Learning how to write short and coherently is a different post.) If you don’t want to read the entire thread, here […]
As Mark Kilby and I work on the geographically distributed teams book, I realized this morning that we need to define cost per feature. I already wrote Wage Cost and Project Labor Cost and the management myth that it’s cheaper to hire people where the wages are less expensive. (It might be, but it might
Do you struggle with your agile approach? Sometimes, iterations don’t work for teams. Sometimes, flow doesn’t work. Sometimes, you need both. To celebrate the release of Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver, I am writing a series of articles on Infoq. The first article, Customize Your Agile Approach: Select Your Agile Approach That Fits
Back in Manage It!, I suggested that for requirements, the questions should be, “How little can we do?” and still have a great product. My argument was this: the longer the project (regardless of approach), the more risk there is. Can you reduce risk by reducing the requirements? That would allow you to release earlier
Last year, I was part of a geographically distributed team who wrote the Agile Practice Guide. Shane Hastie interviewed us during Agile 2017. His interview (which was a ton of fun!) is here: Johanna Rothman and Mike Griffiths on the Agile Alliance/PMI Agile Practice Guide. I learned a ton from that writing experience: Geographically distributed agile
I have a new book in beta, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver. (The in beta part means that it is in copyediting, and then onto layout and print. It’s a process.) I’m so excited about this book. My three most recent Pragmatic Manager newsletters were about jelled teams: The Case For
I’m not going to summarize each part, but to treat all of these as a whole. Let me circle back around to what HR does, as in Part 1: Administration and Benefits Compensation and rewards Education and training Recruitment Hiring If the organization wants to create an agile culture, it makes sense to change the
What can we make more “agile” in HR? Aside from an agile approach to recruiting and hiring, we can make feedback and coaching much more iterative and incremental. Add in collaborative feedback and coaching, and appreciations, and it starts to look like an agile approach to “managing performance.” Performance “Management” is Really About Power In
I wrote about career ladders in Creating Agile HR, Part 5: Performance Management, the Career Ladder. Once you have a career ladder, it’s easy for everyone to understand the criteria for a given level. That means you can use an “agile” approach to manage compensation. Compensation is part of career management. Career management includes: Recognition (what
One of the big roles of HR is to shepherd the assessment of people and their fit for their jobs. That’s called “managing performance.” Managing performance is about: Creating and curating a career ladder for all jobs. That’s exempt (salaried), non-exempt (hourly), and all management. Manage salary parity. HR might help a manager learn how to provide feedback and coaching. (I