I’m giving at a talk at the Sept 19 Yahoo! Program Management Council, Managing for Collaboration. You might think this is a bit of an oxymoron: Managing for collaboration? But when you have programs, collections of projects where the business value is in the deliverable that the collection brings, you have to manage, influence, and […]
My StickyMinds.com column, Do You Need Titled Architects for Your Programs? is up. Please do comment over there.
In my post, When You Have No Product Owner at All, I said That’s because agile needs a responsible person who is not part of the cross-functional technical team to rank the backlog so the team knows the order of the work. Without that person, the team does not know what to do. I’ve had
What happens when you have no product owner at all? How does a team know what features to develop in what order? Several teams I know encountered this. They all had product managers. Most of them had Business Analysts. All of them had a technical manager who was willing to be their product owner, but
I prepare for my speaking and workshop engagements. This year, I’ve been all over the world. I’ve had a great time, and my clients and audiences have had a great time, too. Well, except for this past week at my session, “The Budgeting Black Hole: Predicting the Unpredictable” at Agile 2011. There, I bombed. I
I recently spoke with a colleague who’s a little confused. John was just promoted to being the development manager in a small organization. He’s used to doing lots of work—whatever needs to be done, he does. Now, he’s managing 6 developers in an organization that’s trying to move to agile. No, they haven’t had any
Lisa, Vin, and Derek in their comments on Agile, Architects, and Programs were concerned about how an architect might lead the test architecture work. They have good reason to be concerned. I hadn’t expressed how I see architecture working in an agile program, and they haven’t been to my talks, where I have discussed it.
When I was on vacation, I realized that lots of people already know that we need development architects on complex programs. And, lots of people forget that we also need test architects on complex programs. The more complex the product, the more you need integrated testing, so the more agile makes sense for your product.
Feature-itis. It’s an agile Product Owner game. It’s when the Product Owner says, in his or her best George Carlin voice, “Gimme Features. I don’t care about no stinkin’ framework. I don’t care about no technical debt. I don’t care that it’s going to make your work harder later. I only care about now. I’m
I posted a new newsletter, Three Tips for Your Geographically Dispersed Agile Teams. If you subscribed, you’d have seen it last week… There’s still time to sign up for the workshop in Tel Aviv next week.