agile

agile, MPD

The Value of a Demo

Some teams don’t do demos at the end of their iterations. Many of the teams who don’t do demos also have trouble finishing all the stories they committed to at the beginning of the iteration. They continue, iteration to iteration, not always finishing, not getting to releaseable at the end of the iteration. And, sometimes, […]

agile, MPD

What Should Done Mean, Coda

Last week at Agile 2010, Joshua Kerievsky and I facilitated an Open Jam session (open space) about what done means. We discussed a variety of points. I believe we eventually agreed that context matters. It’s important to know what your product success criteria are. If you don’t use a project charter where you define success

agile, MPD

What Should Done Mean?

Josh Kerievsky has an intriguing post about . The idea is that a story is not done until: A story isn’t done until it is being used by real users in production and has been validated to be a useful part of a product. I have trouble with this definition: The development team is dependent

agile, MPD

Develop by Feature, Develop by Component, or Some Combination?

I’ve been working with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock on an agile architecture workshop. I’m working with Rebecca because she has such a depth of experience in architecture, as well as design. She’s working with me because of my project and program management experience. We’re pretty psyched. We’re working through the issues of large programs and architecture, and,

agile, MPD

Musings About Agile Program Management

I’ve been working with organizations who want to move their programs to agile. They’ve been successful with small projects. But now, they want to make agile work with large programs, programs that involve hardware or firmware, programs with many pieces of interdependent software features, programs of 50 to 300 (or more!) people. Now, you might

agile, MPD

Functional Managers Acting as Scrum Masters: Not a Good Idea

I often meet people who are transitioning to agile, and they decided to pick Scrum, because it’s a helpful project management framework. Ok, that makes sense. But then they decide that they no longer need project managers, and that the development manager can act as the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is not a management

agile, MPD

It's Not Women We Need; It's a Variety of People

The people who are organizing Your Team Needs Women have a good idea–diversity in teams. I have a problem with how they are doing it. I have tried to contribute to the agile community, chairing the Agile 2009 conference, speaking at user groups, writing for a number of outlets, working with my clients. I do

agile, MPD

Agile Managers: The Essence of Leadership

I wrote an article for Cutter IT Journal, called “Agile Managers: The Essence of Leadership.” Cutter has made the entire issue available for free (registration required). See here. If you have comments, please leave them here. I will be posting the article at some point, but not too soon.

agile, MPD

Multiple Product Owners for an Iteration

I’ve been working with clients making the transition to Agile. They are accustomed to a product manager “owning” a product, and negotiating for people to work on their product. Of course, that means begging, borrowing, stealing people from other projects and lots of multitasking. It also means that specific people have very specific knowledge of

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