I had the chance to talk with Andy Kaufman on his podcast, Accelerating Your Agile Journey, PPP 2017. We’ve had the chance to speak informally and more formally on his podcast. This time, we had a wide-ranging discussion. We spoke about many of the ideas in Create Your Successful Agile Project: Learning early (instead of failing […]
I delivered a webinar called Agile Metrics for Team and Product Progress last week, thanks to the nice folks at Innovation Roots. I had fun and so did many of the participants. One person gave me a new saying about metrics (at the end, during the Q&A): Are you data-driven or data-informed? It’s such a great
See Your Agile Delivery Traps Does your team deliver what they want, when they want to? Maybe your team delivers, but depends on another team to deploy. Many teams have trouble delivering the value they so carefully create. Here are three delivery traps I’ve seen in agile teams: The team doesn’t have “done” criteria. The
My most recent article on projectmanagement.com is 3 Questions to Ask Before Estimating an Agile Program. In both Create Your Successful Agile Project and Agile and Lean Program Management, I talk about the reality of estimates in most settings. The question is what kind of an estimate does your project or program need? I’m not opposed to
As Mark Kilby and I work on the geographically distributed teams book, I realized this morning that we need to define cost per feature. I already wrote Wage Cost and Project Labor Cost and the management myth that it’s cheaper to hire people where the wages are less expensive. (It might be, but it might
See Your Agile Collaboration Traps In honor of the impending Create Your Successful Agile Project book release, I decided to send you a four-part series about agile traps. Yes, one for each piece of the subtitle. This one is the collaboration trap. Here are three common collaboration traps: Your team is a component team. (The
I have a new book in beta, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver. (The in beta part means that it is in copyediting, and then onto layout and print. It’s a process.) I’m so excited about this book. My three most recent Pragmatic Manager newsletters were about jelled teams: The Case For
The Manager’s Role in Creating Effective Teams, Part 3 Is it a manager’s job to search through haystacks to find people who can become part of a jelled team? Not really. If you know you have an unjeller, the manager’s job is to prevent that person from being on a team you hope will jell.
Have you ever worked on a project where the management and/or sponsors felt it necessary to provide you warnings: “This release better do this or have that. Otherwise, you’re toast.” I have, once. That’s when I started to use release criteria and check with the sponsors/management to make sure they agreed. I happen to like
I know of a geographically dispersed team across three continents and many time zones collaborating on a product. They work in one-week iterations and have weekly virtual meetings to collaborate in real time. They never have standups because the logistics are impossible. They have handoffs instead. They retrospect at a month-long cadence. (I might like