Projects have problems. That’s why we select life cycles, approaches, and apply risk management as we proceed so we can manage these problems. What’s your #1 project problem? The nice folks at Mavenlink identified 5 major challenges in project management. Here are the top 3: Project plans and scheduling are not aligned (45%) Contention for […]
I’ve been coaching several teams with a problem: they like to work in iterations. And, they have milestones that are not on a milestone boundary. What should they do? (I suggested flow and you should have heard their response. Well, maybe not.) Here’s why people want these milestones: The team can’t deliver (for whatever reason) as continuous
Several years ago, I wrote a post for a different blog called “Why Team Size Matters.” That post is long gone. I explained that the number of communication paths in the team does not increase linearly as the team size increases; team communication paths square when the team increases linearly. Here is the calculation where N is
A reader asked me this question: “How do I report on the 1000 (or so) defects in our system? I have 10 minutes on the status call.” If you are working on a legacy application where the team was not able—for any number of reasons—to maintain technical excellence, you might have a problem like this. So
My most recent post about how to Visualize Your Work So You Can Say No showing a couple of different kanbans was quite popular. Several people ask me how I use my personal kanban. I use paper. Here’s why I don’t use a tool: I am too likely to put too much into a tool.
I recently took a vacation in Israel. I had a blast, and I took a lot of great pictures. Back before we had digital cameras, I had an analog camera. It was a good camera—not high-end, but good enough for my purposes. But when I took pictures, I was almost always disappointed by the results.
As I’m teaching my Practical Product Owner workshop, some POs are having trouble understanding how big a defect is. Sure, they want to have small(er) stories, but a defect isn’t done until it’s all fixed, and the team has decided if they need automated regression tests added to the smoke tests. So, here are three
In Part 1, I talked about small stories/chunks of work, checking in all the time so you could build often and see progress. That assumes you know what done means. Project “done” means release criteria. Here are some stories about how I started using release criteria. Back in the 70s, I worked in a small development group.
Would you like to release your product at any time? I like it when releases are a business decision, not a result of blood, sweat, and tears. It’s possible, and it might not be easy for you. Here are some stories that showed you how I did it, long ago and more recently. Story 1: Many years
(I updated this post in May 2025 to more carefully describe what I mean by collaboration and how that differs from cooperation. I struck through collaboration when I meant cooperation.) A colleague asked mobbing last week on Twitter. Here’s the short answer, including pairing so you can see everything in one place: Swarming has a