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.
Is Your Agile Journey Based on Problems or Process? You can start your agile journey in any number of ways. Some people like to start with Scrum, because it’s a project management framework. Some people like to start with Kanban, because it reflects your current project approach and allows you to visualize your workflow. You
How to Avoid Three Big Estimation Traps I bet you need to estimate how large your project or program will be, at the gross level: “It’s bigger than a breadbasket. It’s smaller than a person on the moon.” More likely, “It’s about x people for about y months with this percentage confidence.” Or, you use
Standup or Handoff? You have a geographically distributed agile team. You have team members more than six hours apart. (If you’re not sure how far apart people are, take a look at Managing Timezones in Geographically Distributed Teams). How do you have standups that mean something, when people have completed work, can commit to work, and
Time for a Decision On a recent flight, I sat next to the VP of Sales for a large multinational company. Their new big product in development needs a new pricing structure that requires agreement across the organization. Can he get a decision? No. He’s conducted conference call after conference call for months. No decision.
Three Secrets for a Successful Job Search Are you looking for a job? If you are, I bet you’ve received advice from many people–whether or not you wanted it. Here are my three secret ingredients for a successful search: Secret #1: Create a system that works for you. I happen to like personal kanban inside
Is the Urgent Consuming You? When you start work in the morning, what do you do? Do you check email, listen to your voicemail? Let the urgent take over your day? Do your meetings drive your day? If you do, you are not alone. Is there a better way? There can be. You can take
Emergent Projects: Managing the Unpredictable Are you planning a change project, managing your way through a job search, or some other not-totally-deterministic project? Wouldn’t it be nice if life went according to plan? You could create a roadmap first, estimate how long things would take to get done, create a project plan, and do them.