I wrote a column for Gantthead, How to Use Iteration Zero (or Not). I’m not a big fan of iteration zero, except for learning. In which case, it’s a great idea. Go take a look and see what you think. Please leave comments over there.
I delivered a keynote last week at StarWest, Becoming a Kick-A** Test Manager.” If you want to watch me in action, you can register for the virtual conference, and see a number of the keynotes and talks. I had an interview, too. I try to build interaction into all my talks, including my keynotes. I
I have another management myth posted on Stickyminds. This one is about training. “Management Myth #9: We Have No Time for Training” is up on the site. Now, I have to admit, that when I was a new manager, I fell for this myth. Oh, I knew enough to make sure that we had lunch-and-learns.
I’m finally writing a Pragmatic Manager email to my faithful readers. That’s when I noticed I had forgotten to post my July email newsletter. Yikes! So, here is What Does Your Organization Reward? I am committed to emailing another email newsletter this week. Are you on my newsletter list? Sign up on my site or
When I was in Brazil teaching the project portfolio workshop, one of the participants explained that his organization sometimes did a form of gold/silver/bronze comparison among the projects. Here’s how it works. Everyone wrote their project names on stickies. The first cut is everyone self-assigns their projects to Gold, Silver, Bronze categories. That’s right, everyone
My most recent management myth is up on Techwell, Management Myth #8: I Can Still Do Significant Technical Work. I see managers catch themselves in this one all the time. Maybe you do too. Maybe you disagree with me. Comment over there, please. BTW, This article is a partial attempt to answer the question, “How
I facilitated a project management clinic last week at PSL. One of the questions was this: We have a product owner who persists in changing the contents of the sprint during the sprint. This is difficult for us. It costs us to change the content. Okay, this is a huge pain in the tush. It’s
In my talk, How Much Will this Project Cost? at Agile 2012 last week, I got to say, “Short is beautiful.” For those of you who have never seen me, I’m five feet tall. The question was something like this: For programs, don’t you want longer iterations, so people don’t have the overhead of planning,
If you are planning a vacation, read my next management myth, Management Myth #7: I Am too Valuable to Take a Vacation. It doesn’t matter where you are in the organization, you need to take a vacation. And, you need to totally remove yourself from the day-to-day grind when you do. Read it.
I’ve been talking to a variety of potential clients about their project portfolios. One of the big problems is how to see all the work. Some of these folks have multiple kinds of projects, so they want to show their work in a variety of ways. What do you do when you have a few