As Mark Kilby and I work through the images and text for the geographically distributed teams book, I wanted to clarify what collocated and distributed mean. Collocated teams sit near each other in space. However, not everyone agrees on what is “near.” In Developing Products in Half the Time, Smith and Reinertsen use the Allen […]
Do you struggle with your agile approach? Sometimes, iterations don’t work for teams. Sometimes, flow doesn’t work. Sometimes, you need both. To celebrate the release of Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver, I am writing a series of articles on Infoq. The first article, Customize Your Agile Approach: Select Your Agile Approach That Fits
Back in Manage It!, I suggested that for requirements, the questions should be, “How little can we do?” and still have a great product. My argument was this: the longer the project (regardless of approach), the more risk there is. Can you reduce risk by reducing the requirements? That would allow you to release earlier
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
I’m not going to summarize each part, but to treat all of these as a whole. Let me circle back around to what HR does, as in Part 1: Administration and Benefits Compensation and rewards Education and training Recruitment Hiring If the organization wants to create an agile culture, it makes sense to change the
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 that was women
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
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
One of the challenges as an organization becomes agile is what to do with HR and Finance. How can HR and Finance become more agile? In this series, I’ll address HR (Human Resources). (I’d actually started drafting this series a few months ago, but Diana Larsen pinged me with her note of Human Resources Is Dead.
We might start to think about agile approaches as a project change. However, if you want to “scale” agile, the entire culture changes. Here is a list of the series and how everything changes the organization’s culture: Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 1: Creating Cross-Functional Feature Teams. Without feature teams, I don’t see how you can