About 20 years ago, I taught a project management workshop to IT people. Their products and services did not ship outside the building—their products and services enabled the organization to make money. During that workshop, the participants all had the same question, “How do we engage our stakeholders?” For years, I explained that the more […]
I’m reviewing experience report proposals for the XP 2023 conference. While I see potential in many of these proposals, I don’t see enough proposals that make me say, “Yes! I want to read this report! And see the speaker!” (Yes, I react in exclamation marks when I read a terrific proposal.) Experience reports allow us
Several people on social media have denigrated the terms “project manager” and “program manager.” These people claim there is no need for either role in an effective team, especially an agile team because the team can manage its own deliverables. While some agile teams can manage their own deliverables, that’s not the only role for
I’m about to email the logistics for the Q1 2023 Free Your Inner Writer workshop. (The workshop is based on my best-selling book, Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer.) If you want to learn to write fast and well, join us in this workshop. I can support just two more writers in this cohort. If you’re
Jim, a relatively new manager said, “I don’t have nearly enough time. I’m in meetings all the time. And I still need to do some of my previous technical work. I feel stretched from one end of the work day to the other.” We spoke for a few minutes. I asked him to eyeball the
Do you struggle with writing? You’d like to write more and faster, but things are just not working for you. I can help. I have opened the Q1 2023 Free Your Inner Writer workshop for registration. If you want to write easier and faster, read the book. If you want my support in your writing, take
On the ANE panel last night, an agile coach asked, “What’s my path forward as an agile coach? What do I do next?” That’s a great question and one each coach might ask, to make sure they continue to add value to the client. (Internal or external, all coaches have clients.) I said that if
If we want more ease and better results, we need to be able to change when the world changes. Yet, we don’t always notice these changes, so we don’t create options and experiment. Too often, we feel as if the world drags us down. We double-down on what we’ve been doing. Instead, we need to
I started this series by realizing managers have (too) many decisions to make. The longer it takes managers to make any single decision, the longer it might take to make all the decisions. That’s Little’s Law, applied to decisions. In Part 1, I recommended that managers start with their oldest possible decision and decide what
Many managers feel pressure to deliver finished work. They plan and replan—and ask the teams to plan and replan. They plan to be able to predict the future. But there are several problems with all this planning: These plans require prediction at all levels, from strategy to product to what the team delivers. That’s a