MPD

management, MPD

The Challenge of a Lightning Talk

I’m at Belgium Testing Days, and in about 90 minutes, I’ll be giving a lightning talk as part of a keynote. I  love lightning talks because I love to talk and I love the challenge of a 5-minute, go-for-broke, get-it-organized, and do-it. And, it’s an excuse to drink a lot of cold caffeine in preparation.

MPD, project management

What You Can Do For Estimation

In  But I Need to Know When the Project Will Be Done, I talked about what you can do for estimating an agile project (do a gross estimate of the backlog, estimate your velocity, better your estimate every iteration and keep talking to your management).  What if you have a contract? What if your managers

MPD, project management

But I Need to Know When the Project Will Be Done

I was talking with a new-to-agile project manager, who said he needed take the first iteration to do design and estimation. I asked why. “Because our management needs to know exactly when the project will be done.” “Do you think your iteration of design and estimation will provide you a perfect estimate?” “Uh.” He paused.

MPD

Appreciations from Japan Trip

I had a great time in Japan last week with Esther. On the flight home, we started plotting our next book! @kaztak_en, Thank you for your invitation to see your team. It looks and sounds as if you are on your agile way. @kdmsnr, Thank you for your gracious hosting on Tuesday. You were even

MPD, portfolio management

Don’t Start a Project with Scarcity

I was talking with a project manager the other day. He said, “I don’t have enough developers, testers, or UI people. What am I going to do?” I said, “Well, you have enough people if you have more time. Do you have more time?” He rolled his eyes, and said, “What do you think?” “Then,

MPD, program management

"Headquarters" and "Remote": Language Matters

I’ve been working with program teams lately, and some of them have issues when they talk about different teams on their programs when they use words such as “headquarters” and “remote” locations. The headquarters teams tell me the remote teams don’t listen to them and the remote teams tell me the headquarters teams don’t hear

agile, MPD

Agile Programs Require Agile Teams, Up, Down, Sideways

A few months ago at Agile Boston, Mike Cottmeyer said that when he looks at teams who want to scale agile, he looks at their ability to create working teams. If they can create teams, they can scale. If they can’t, they have little hope of scaling agile. (Mike, if I’m misquoting you, I’ll correct

agile, MPD

How Short Can Your Program Charters Be?

A great way to destroy a program is to avoid writing a charter. When I do assessments or work with teams, I often find that programs do not have charters, or that the charter is too big, or is missing some key piece of information. But what do you really need in a charter? Too

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