If you are thinking of agile as part of a program, each team has to have its own approach to agile. Why? Because each team has its own risks and problems. You don’t need to standardize agile for anyone. If you treat people as if they are adults and explain the principles that you want […]
What do you do for geographically distributed teams, if you want to move to agile? First question: does the team want to move to agile? Or, does the management want to move to agile? I am serious. I might take the same actions, but for different different reasons. In either case, the team needs to
The point of using agile is to get finish something valuable-to-the-business quickly, to get feedback. Why? For several reasons, but the first one is so you can change the project’s priorities. The second is so you can change the project portfolio. The third is to get feedback on what you’ve done. Okay, you can exchange
The more I see teams transition to agile, the more I am convinced that each team is unique. Each project is unique. Each organizational context is unique. Why would you take an off-the-shelf solution that does not fit your context? (I wrote Manage It! because I believe in a context-driven approach to project management in
I have a new column up on project management.com. It’s called Debugging Your Geographically Distributed Agile Team. (You have to register to read it. Registration is free.) You can do agile with geographically distributed teams. You might not be able to do Scrum. You have other choices of approaches. Helping a team form is tough.
While I was on vacation in early January, there were two interviews posted on InfoQ: Ben Linders interviewed Esther Derby, Don Gray, and me about the Change Artistry book. I’m really pleased about the way the interview came out. Thanks, Ben! Back at Agile 2013, Shane Hastie interviewed me. The interview is here. We spoke
If you read my most recent post, Comparing Teams Is Not Useful: Exposing Another Management Myth and the comments, you will see that I rant about the business of normalizing story points for predicting cost or schedule for a program. That led to several comments re SAFe for programs or other frameworks or lifecycles for
Do you want to immortalize your agile team? Would you like to contribute to the research about how agile teams collaborate? If so, have I got a deal for you. My friend and colleague, David Socha, a professor at the University of Washington, in the Seattle area is writing a grant for the NSF to
I have an article up on TechTarget, called Alternative project management styles are faster than multitasking. I had originally called the article “Multitasking makes you stupid-you have alternatives.” 🙂 There’s my Queen of the Career-limiting conversation thing going again. Would you have read the article with the original title? Eh, maybe not. In any case,
I gave a talk at Devs in the ‘Ditch last week when I was in London. I posted the slides on slideshare: Overcoming Three Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile. The very nice people at 7digital made a video and posted it, too. If you can take the time, watch the entire video. Rob Bowyer gave