MPD

Books, MPD

Another Review of Manage Your Project Portfolio

Jonathan Rasmussen wrote a lovely review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. The part I like the best is: If you are looking for advice around what to measure when tracking your projects, how to come up with an actionable mission statement, or just how to effectively communicate the state of your portfolio ask Santa for […]

agile, Books, MPD

Book Review: Agile Samurai by Jonathan Rasmusson

I knew I was going to like The Agile Samurai from the first page: Agile is a way of developing software that reminds us that although computers run the code, it’s people who create and maintain it. Jonathan Rasmussen, the Other JR, has written a great, short, to-the-point book about how to move a project

MPD, program management

Reduce Friction

On the bike at the gym this morning, I thought about increasing my level. When I exercise, more friction is good. But when you develop or use products, more friction is bad. Brian Marick talks about  this when he speaks and writes about “ease” for development teams. If you’ve encountered a web page that made

Books, MPD

Great Review of Manage Your Project Portfolio

Inez has a great review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. What resonated with me was: this book gives a more complete view of what is at stake when dealing with project portfolio management and will really help organisations to move forward faster with implementing and improving this key business issue of the 21st century, the

MPD

Context Matters: Premature Optimization or Habits From Long Ago?

I’m at the Much Ado About Agile conference this week, in beautiful Vancouver. During lunch one day, one of the conference participants started talking about premature optimization of code. Well, I know a few things about that. When I started to work professionally as a developer, I wrote in assembly language. We had 256 bytes

MPD

Dispersed vs. Distributed Teams

I’ve been meeting people who call their teams distributed. But their teams are dispersed. That is, some team members are in one place, and some team members are in another. In the worst cases, there are separate people all over the world. For example, if you have cross-functional teams in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and

agile, MPD

Agile Program Titles

I’ve been working with and discussing agile program management with a bunch of people.  One of the big issues is: what do we call certain people at the program level? We need a program manager, someone who sets/explains the program’s vision, develops program-wide release criteria with sponsors, has a way to articulate program status, someone

MPD

Assessing Your Team State

I’ve been working with teams and been a part of teams my entire work life. Not so much at university, but certainly when I started working professionally. I’ve been confused by what some people claim are self-organizing teams. To me, they don’t look particularly self-organizing. I read Brad Appleton’s excellent series of blog posts on

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