Did you ever work on a project that dragged on and on, slipping a week every week? Back in the day, we called those projects “death marches.” I never saw anyone literally die, but I saw too many divorces, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and very dissatisfied and unhappy employees and customers. Waterfall projects can […]
Three Tips to Support Your Successful Hybrid-Remote Team Now that we’ve proved we can work remotely, I predict some form of remote work is here to stay. However, we won’t see all nebula teams, where everyone is remote from each other. Instead, we’ll have some form of hybrid teams—some people in an office and others
Modern Management: Start with Congruence to Change Your Culture Do you want a more effective organizational culture that delivers more agility? Maybe you’ve tried agile framework for teams or products. While you’ve seen some improvement, you’re not where you thought you’d be. Instead of focusing on practices or team principles, consider changing your culture to
Modern Management: Use Your Integrity Even if You Fear for Your Job Susan, the Platform Director, was worried about ProductA—still in development. The company received about 75% of its revenue from that one product. Worse, VeryImportantCustomer, VIC, accounted for half of that revenue. And from the demos, Susan could see the teams were not going to
Modern Management: Catch People Succeeding When was the last time someone noticed that you did something great? Too often, we hear plenty about what we did that was wrong. But we have research—and experience—that says when people notice what we do well, we tend to do more of that. Here are two examples. A Team Skills
Modern Management: Encourage Experiments and Learning How much of your work directly supports the people you lead and serve? How much of your work supports the environment or the culture so the people can be more effective? If you work directly with the people you lead and serve, you work in the business. If you work to
Modern Management: Want Valuable Outcomes? Create Overarching Goals Organizations create all kinds of goals: for revenue, for the number of new and retained customers, and when they can release products. Then they cascade the goals “down” to individuals. When we create these individual “goals,” we create outputs. Even when we work with others, those outputs
Modern Management: Build a Safe Environment In the agile community, we talk a lot about psychological safety. That’s the safety we need to discuss problems, challenges, or concerns. Here are two examples I’ve seen recently, one at the team level and one in management. A Team Example Cindy, a tester, was convinced the product had
Modern Management: Build Empathy with the People Who Do the Work Here’s a scenario I see too often in organizations. The product teams are supposed to work on several products “at once.” They have several goals for their work, not one specific goal. Why? Because the managers feel too much pressure to reduce the organizational
Modern Management: What Value Do You Offer? Sherry, a VP, was worried. Cliff, a new director, insisted on keeping his “hands in” the code. Now, she realized Cliff focused more on the code than his director role. And he irritated the team because he no longer understood enough of the technical details. Sherry had offered