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.
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
Ashley Moran wrote a wonderful review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. I particularly like these quotes: There’s a wealth of tips for making the whole process effective, with some unexpected ones thrown in. The sections How to Kill a Project and Keep it Dead and Discover Barriers to Collaboration are little gems. … It’s also amazing that
I’m delighted with the Ann Drinkwater’s review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. Some excerpts: … Johanna has translated on paper what sounds good to what really works. … The author’s informal and no nonsense approach aided in the delivery of content. I’d recommend this book to everyone, from those just starting out in management trying
It’s been a few difficult weeks. First, I came down with a bad head cold. It’s almost funny, watching a person with vertigo and a head cold try to walk. Unless you are that person 😉 Then Daughter #2 contracted mono. Then the rains came and my office flooded–twice. I’ve spent a bunch of time
I’ve been working with teams who want to move to agile. Some people on their teams are in another location, where the salaries are cheaper. It’s difficult to get agile started with a geographically distributed team. If everyone’s distributed, it’s easier than if just some people–especially if they are all one function, such as developers
Steve Berczuk has a lovely discussion of Manage Your Project Portfolio. You can see his review here.
Last week, when I was on vacation, my most recent Stickyminds column went up. I somehow expected more comments. Maybe other people were on vacation, too?
One of the problems many people encounter when moving to agile is that they (literally) cannot imagine iterations shorter than 4 weeks. I rarely recommend an iteration as long as 4 weeks now, and if people insist on 3 weeks, suggest they find the root cause for the reason their iteration needs to be so
I’ve been working with Gil Broza on our teleclass series, Prevent Your Agile Titanic, both on marketing it and on its content. And it never fails, we have questions for each other almost every day. Sometimes I’m developing something and it looks “funny.” So I ask for review. Sometimes, as with the content, we discuss