Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Let me circle back around to what HR does, as in Part 1: Administration and Benefits Compensation and rewards Education and training Recruitment Hiring Of these, it makes sense to change the compensation and rewards approach, recruitment and hiring if the organization wants to create an agile culture. It’s possible to create a more agile …
Sourcing, how and where you recruit possible candidates is a great way to use small, safe-to-fail experiments. That’s because the recruiting landscape continues to change. A little history: in the past, we read newspapers—on paper! Before the Civil Rights Act, employers advertised for “Men Wanted” and “Women Wanted.” (I don’t remember if it was women …
Continue reading “Creating Agile HR, Part 4: Agile Sourcing”
One of the problems with agile hiring is this: what data do you collect? Let me digress for a bit and talk about cycle time and lead time. This image explains cycle time and lead time for a cross-functional team. Everything starts in the Ready column and proceeds through the possible progression through development and …
Continue reading “Creating Agile HR, Part 3: Possible Agile Hiring Metrics”
This is part of an Agile HR series. The previous post is Creating Agile HR, Part 1: What HR Does This post is about creating a flow for agile hiring. Why flow? Very few people hire continuously. That means resumes don’t arrive at the every day, and certainly not at the same pace of arrival—or even …
Continue reading “Creating Agile HR, Part 2: A Flow for Agile Hiring”
I keep hearing about the “Skills gap.” There is no skills gap. There is a gap between what employers want to pay and what people are willing to work for. I read an article this morning that prompted this post: Talk of a skills gap in the labor market is ‘an incredible cop out’ Let …
Agile 2015 was the week of Aug 3-7 this year. It was a great week. Here are the links to my interviews and talks. Interview with Dave Prior. We spoke about agile programs, continuous planning, and how you might use certifications. I made a little joke about measurement. Interview with Paul DuPuy of SolutionsIQ. We …
We talk a lot in agile about generalizing specialists. Scott Ambler has a terrific essay on what a generalizing specialist is: Has one or more technical specialties… Has at least a general knowledge of software development. Has at least a general knowledge of the business domain in which they work. Actively seeks to gain new …
Continue reading “Five Tips to Hiring a Generalizing Specialist”
Now that you know what you expect from your Scrum Master’s job (the deliverables), and you know the essential and desirable skills (the first three tips), you can focus on creating the interview questions and audition. (If you have not yet read Six Tips for Interviewing Scrum Masters, Part 1 for the first three tips, …
Continue reading “Six Tips for Interviewing Scrum Masters, Part 2”
People want to know the “secret sauce” for hiring Scrum Masters and agile coaches. I wish it was easy to provide a standard set of questions. Because your agile team is unique, your questions should be different. However, there are some common qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills among Scrum Masters. First, do a job analysis …
Continue reading “Six Tips for Interviewing Scrum Masters, Part 1”
If you’re a hiring manager, you might think that once you’ve made the offer you’re home free. Not quite. Maybe you think that once your new hire starts, you’re home free. Nope. You don’t get to see the results of your new hire until your new hire is integrated into the day-to-day work of the …
Continue reading “An Agile Approach From Job Offer to Start to Success”