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
Creating an Environment of Leadership I bet you have some problems that have been problems for a while. Or, you want to influence other people to change. You need an environment of leadership, because you can’t do it alone. Here are three tips to creating an environment where everyone can lead: Tip #1: Share the
Discovering Your Leadership Do you think managers are the only leaders in your organization? Nope. We have always needed leaders at all levels of the organization. You might not feel like a leader. How do you discover your leadership? Ellie, a tester working on a supposedly agile team, was worried. The team worked in timeboxes,
Johanna’s 2014 New Year’s Tips Every year, I write a tips letter for you, instead of suggesting you try resolutions. Maybe you can incorporate one of these tips to make your 2015 more effective. Tip #1: Create time for your thinking work. You have meetings. You have email. You have voicemail, text messages, and more
Do You Have an Abundance or Scarcity Mindset? Have you met people at work who believe in zero-sum games, with one winner and one loser? “You must do my project. I don’t care about anyone else.” That you-against-me is an indication of a scarcity mindset. Some people believe in the abundance mindset where, together, we create
Go Small to Gain Momentum You’ve seen projects that start off great. They zoom along, delivering. And then something happens. They slow to a crawl. Sometimes, they get stuck so badly you decide to stop and declare victory (or defeat) and start all over. What can you do to make sure that doesn’t happen to
Scale Agile With Small-World Networks Some organizations, when they think of programs (a collection of projects with one business objective), think of many teams, each with Scrum Masters or project managers. That’s one way to scale agile. That’s scaling up. It creates a hierarchy. Hierarchy can slow you down with centralized decision-making, coordination, and communication.