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
Understand Your Project Interdependencies Do you have interdependencies in your projects and programs? People on one team need something or someone from another team. Part of the problem is that we use the same word (interdependency) to describe two different problems. Teams can solve sequencing interdependencies. Teams need managers to solve specialist interdependencies. In Sequencing
New Year’s Tips for 2017 Other people like to help you plan for resolutions. Well, I’m a bit contrary. I don’t buy this resolution business. I never succeed. (I’m not alone in that.) On the other hand, I like to integrate tips for my next year from my learnings from the previous year. I’ve been
Iterations and Increments: For Any Project A project manager, Dave, is struggling with his project. His organization is not interested in using agile. Agile has a bad name, given their three-time attempt to adopt agile. (I’ll address that problem in another Pragmatic Manager.) That’s fine. Agile is not for everyone. However, Dave knows that prototyping
Knowledge, Risks, and Guarantees One senior manager in an organization trying to use agile told me about his problems, “We still need to know when the project will be done. We can’t afford the risk of missing the deadline. When we spent all that time on requirements, the team knew what they were doing. We
3 Quick Project Portfolio Tips The second edition of Manage Your Project Portfolio is available now, in ebook and paper. I’m so excited. To celebrate, here are three tips to help you manage your project portfolio. Tip 1. Make your work visible. When I lead workshops to help people understand how to manage their project
Plan, Plan, Plan Do you like planning? You might be one of those people who likes to make lists and plan in great detail. I love my lists. I’m not big on huge, ginormous plans, but I do like a list of what to do now and the picture of where I’m headed. You might
Create an Environment of Delivery One of the nice things about agile and lean approaches is that they focus on delivering value. I’m a huge fan of delivering value. The larger and longer your project or program, the more delivering value is important. That’s because your organization is investing in your project or program. They