If you read my Three Alternatives to Making Smaller Stories, you noticed one thing. In each of these examples, the problem was in the teams’ ability to show progress and create interim steps. But, what about when you have a “wicked” problem, when you don’t know if you can create the answer? If you are […]
When I was in Israel a couple of weeks ago teaching workshops, one of the big problems people had was large stories. Why was this a problem? If your stories are large, you can’t show progress, and more importantly, you can’t change. For me, the point of agile is the transparency—hey, look at what we’ve
I posted my most recent Pragmatic Manager newsletter, Scale Agile With Small-World Networks on my site. This is a way you can scale agile out, not up. No hierarchies needed. Small-world networks take advantage of the fact that people want to help other people in the organization. Unless you have created MBOs (Management By Objectives)
If you are organized as platform team, middleware, and front-end teams, you have a component team organization. That made sense at one point in your history. But if you are transitioning to agile or have transitioned, and if you want to use agile on a program, that might not make much sense now. If you
I posted my slides for my Agile 2014 talk, Agile Projects, Program & Portfolio Management: No Air Quotes Required on Slideshare. It’s a bootcamp talk, so the majority of the talk is making sure that people understand the basics about projects. Walk before you run. That part. However, you can take projects and “scale” them
In preparation for my talk, Agile Projects, Programs, and Portfolio Management: No Air Quotes Required, I have created a Minimum Reading List for an Agile Transition. Note the emphasis on minimum. I could have added many more books to this list. But the problem I see is that people don’t read anything. They think they
I published a Pragmatic Manager yesterday to my subscribers. Normally, I let them enjoy the pleasure of being “in-the-know” about what I have to say this month for a while before I post the emails to my site. Read the Pragmatic Manager here: Standup or Handoff. However, I made a Big Mistake in where I
At the Better Software/Agile Development conference a couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk entitled At Least Five Tips for Improving Your Geographically Distributed Agile Team. (That link goes to the slideshare.) If you look at Scott Ambler’s 2011 survey, you can see that his data matches my consulting experience. About half of all
This post is what you do when you are a program manager and not everyone knows what “agile” is, when you create a new product, when you are introducing that much cultural change? (In the program management book, I will talk more specifically about change and what to do. This post is the highlights.) Project
You might have noticed I’ve slowed my blogging in the past few weeks. I’m fine. I’ve been a product owner/customer for our new-to-us house remodel. In the last several weeks, almost every single day, Mark and I have taken some time to go over to the new house to see the progress and provide feedback