See Your Agile Measurement Traps In honor of my new book, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver, this is the second in a series of four trap emails, the measurement trap. Here are three common measurement traps: You/your management thinks velocity is a target or a measure of progress. Someone (often a […]
See Your Agile Collaboration Traps In honor of the impending Create Your Successful Agile Project book release, I decided to send you a four-part series about agile traps. Yes, one for each piece of the subtitle. This one is the collaboration trap. Here are three common collaboration traps: Your team is a component team. (The
The Value of Planning I like my plans. I have several levels of plans: a year or so specifically for books and workshops, a 6-month roadmap so I stay on track or change my track, a one-month week-by-week proposed roadmap, and a weekly plan. I use a kanban board to manage my weekly plans. (See
The Manager’s Role in Creating Effective Teams, Part 3 Is it a manager’s job to search through haystacks to find people who can become part of a jelled team? Not really. If you know you have an unjeller, the manager’s job is to prevent that person from being on a team you hope will jell.
The Case Against Stable Teams, Part 2 In The Case for Stable Teams, Part 1 , I wrote about stable teams as a way to create jelled teams. My guideline was that the longer it took for people to be useful in the team, the more you needed a stable team. Otherwise, the cost of
The Case for Stable Teams, Part 1 A long-time reader, Al, asked me about jelled teams. What makes a team jell? Would I please write an email about that? This is part 1 of 3 part series about teams. Often, a manager forms a new team. The team storms as the people establish themselves and
Own Your Leadership, Part 3 I started this story back in Own Your Leadership, Part 1: Dave and Sherry collaborated to facilitate their team’s ability to deliver one completed feature at a time, to improve the team’s throughput and quality. In Own Your Leadership, Part 2, Sherry realized the team doesn’t have a real PO,
Own Your Leadership, Part 2 In Own Your Leadership Part 1: Dave and Sherry collaborated on seeing if the team could deliver one feature at a time, to improve the team’s throughput and quality. They had mixed success. The first story took them three full days, instead of their anticipated one day. All the other
Own Your Leadership, Part 1 Dave is a new team lead. As a team lead, he was supposed to help with his organization’s transition to agile and help the more junior members of his team learn the codebase. His team had several problems: each person worked alone, their one tester was overwhelmed, and he, Dave,
Being an Agile Leader People tell me agile is past mainstream now, into the late adopters. I don’t buy it. Oh, agile has jumped the shark and made it into our vernacular. The result: I too often see agile as something the teams should do, without management using agile to improve the environment or their