Use the Power of Your Rumor Mill Project and program managers often ask, “How can I get people to work across teams? I don’t want to delay people or solve problems for them when they can solve problems themselves. I just don’t know what to try.” My advice: Use the rumor mill. You’ve seen the
Scaling Agile and Lean to Programs Using agile or lean for one project can be a challenge. What happens when you want to extend agile or lean to multiple projects or across the organization? Many people try frameworks. Frameworks assume you have the same context and challenges as other efforts–even inside your organization. You have
Build Your Agile Leadership In your organization, agile has helped your teams improve their value delivery. Although the teams retrospect, you expected more improvement. You think your agile journey might be stuck. Maybe it’s time for you to build a culture of agile leadership. Tip 1. Make your work transparent. Do other people know what
Feeling Alone on Your Agile Journey? Do you feel as if you are waving the agile flag and no one cares? You know what you, your team, and your management needs to do. No one seems to be able to put your suggestions into practice. Worse, sometimes, it looks as if no one cares, except
Define Your Agile Success I bet many of you are working to use agile in your organization. Is your agile approach working for you? If you think you could use agile better, maybe it’s time to define what agile success means to you. Consider these three questions: What is valuable to us? How will we
Productive Vs. Busy I received some fascinating responses to Do You Want More Productivity? One correspondent told me that managers need to move people—especially testers—from one project where they are not busy to another project where they could help. His experience matches mine—many projects do not have enough testers. However, we do not share the
Do You Want More Productivity? A senior manager asked me, “How do I get more productivity out of my people? We have cross-functional teams. Each team has their expertise. I just feel as if the teams could do more.” I asked, “What kind of expertise? Is it expertise as a team or are people experts
Commitments or Resilience Ben, a program manager, said, “My management wants a quarterly commitment. They think this will let them commit to customers about features. But, this is a problem for a couple of reasons: we change our minds more often than once every 12 weeks and the managers are talking to other managers, not
Creating Trustworthy Estimates Do the people who ask you for estimates trust your estimates? It’s difficult to build trustworthy estimates. Here are three tips you can try for estimates that work for you, not against you. Tip #1: Never provide a single-point estimate. When people ask me for an estimate, I provide a percentage confidence
Do You Have Too Much to Do? If you are like most of the people I work with and meet, you have too much to do. You’d like to say, “No!” to more work, but maybe you’re not sure how. The first step is to gather all the work, so you and everyone else knows