This post is what you do when you are a program manager and not everyone knows what “agile” is, when you create a new product, when you are introducing that much cultural change? (In the program management book, I will talk more specifically about change and what to do. This post is the highlights.) Project […]
If you are thinking of agile as part of a program, each team has to have its own approach to agile. Why? Because each team has its own risks and problems. You don’t need to standardize agile for anyone. If you treat people as if they are adults and explain the principles that you want
What do you do for geographically distributed teams, if you want to move to agile? First question: does the team want to move to agile? Or, does the management want to move to agile? I am serious. I might take the same actions, but for different different reasons. In either case, the team needs to
The point of using agile is to get finish something valuable-to-the-business quickly, to get feedback. Why? For several reasons, but the first one is so you can change the project’s priorities. The second is so you can change the project portfolio. The third is to get feedback on what you’ve done. Okay, you can exchange
The more I see teams transition to agile, the more I am convinced that each team is unique. Each project is unique. Each organizational context is unique. Why would you take an off-the-shelf solution that does not fit your context? (I wrote Manage It! because I believe in a context-driven approach to project management in
Join me for a webinar on March 10, 2014 at 7pm Eastern. My topic is “Overcoming 7 Common Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile in Software Engineering.” I’m speaking as part of the Graduate Professional Studies Spring 2014 Guest Speaker Series. Register here. P.S. If you missed the webinar, here is the audio recording. Enjoy!
I just finished the electronic version of Manage Your Job Search, integrating my comments from my beta reviewers. I’m getting the book ready for print and audio now. One of my realizations is that a job search is an emergent project. As much as you might want to, you cannot predict an end date. Other
I had a great conversation last week with someone taking a leadership course. (Not one of my courses. His instructor wouldn’t talk to him!! He’d seen one of my posts and emailed me. Of course I talked with him.) He was confused by the word “Handoff.” He thought it meant that people hadn’t done their
Are you transitioning to agile? Is it going well? If it your transition is going well, excellent. I’m happy for you. But if you are like many of the leaders across the organization I’ve met, you have plenty of problems. Sometimes you have a problem as this colleague said, Right now we’re really struggling with
When I talk about interviewing an agile team, many people think, “Oh, we should pair!” and that’s it. But, many teams don’t pair regularly. If you pair in the interview and you don’t pair at work, you have an incongruent interview. That’s not helpful to you or your candidate. Instead, you want to create an