Now that the election is over, we have an opportunity to reflect on some of the project management and hiring practices. I’m going to blog here and over at Hiring Technical People because the bits are just too juicy to leave untouched. If you read nothing else, read Inside Orca: How the Romney Campaign Suppressed […]
Are you working long? My column, Management Myth 10: I can Measure the Work by the Time People Spend at Work is posted today. People who work long hours think they also work hard. They are. But they are often not working smart. If you have a lot to do, you want to work smart,
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 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
I’m giving a talk at Agile 2012, entitled “How Much Will This Project Cost?” It doesn’t seem to matter what life cycle your project has, someone wants you to predict the cost. The problem is, it’s the wrong question. But, that won’t stop people from asking it anyway. People want to know the cost so
I’ve been having some email conversations with some project and program managers turned Scrum Masters. In general here’s how things have proceeded: Their organizations decided agile was a great idea Their organizations decided Scrum was a great idea to implement agile (because they don’t know the difference between Scrum and agile) The teams started working
I have an article posted at InfoQ, Swarming Across Distance. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. You have to think about how to swarm. It’s not always intuitively obvious. Enjoy!
I’ve been talking to people whose management cares about their velocity. “My management wants us to double our velocity.” Or, “My management wants us to do more in a sprint.” Or, “My management wants to know when we will be a hyper-performing team, so they want to know when we will get 12x velocity like
Shane and the participants and I had a great time at the Geographically Distributed Agile Teams workshop last week. We ran a couple of simulations, and here are some of the emails the teams had: Do you have something for us to test yet? We have completed the card Hi again. I didn’t hear back
I’ve had several conversations in email and with clients recently that have all been about this question: “What do we do about our infrastructure?” Either the project or the program has to create/update/upgraded their architecture or automated test infrastructure, pay down technical debt, or somehow do something that’s not part of a story. And, that’s