I said in Hiring for an Agile Team: Making Tradeoffs, that we have a shortage of qualified people for the open agile positions. That’s based on anecdotal evidence, i.e. every hiring manager I talk to who says, “Johanna, I can’t find any agile people.” Most of the time, their ads are broken. But, once we […]
If you read my most recent post, Comparing Teams Is Not Useful: Exposing Another Management Myth and the comments, you will see that I rant about the business of normalizing story points for predicting cost or schedule for a program. That led to several comments re SAFe for programs or other frameworks or lifecycles for
I gave a talk at Devs in the ‘Ditch last week when I was in London. I posted the slides on slideshare: Overcoming Three Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile. The very nice people at 7digital made a video and posted it, too. If you can take the time, watch the entire video. Rob Bowyer gave
Over on agileconnection, a user asked about a self-assessment tool for measuring agile maturity. That’s not exactly the right question, because agile transition is a journey, not a destination. But, I can understand why he asked the question. I tried to be helpful. I supplied a set of questions to ask. Maybe you can go
Imagine you are transitioning to agile. You are a program manager, with a couple of agile projects, and a couple of traditional projects. How do you manage the program? Here’s what a program team looks like. For the sake of argument, assume that Sally is an agile program manager, because we can tell she’s working
I keep hearing a lot about “chief” this and “chief” that when it comes to Big Agile, aka program management. You know, chief product owner, chief architect, that kind of thing. I’m kind of puzzled. I thought agile was all about self organization and no command-and-control. Chief anything reeks of command-and-control to me. At the
Note: I wrote this article in 2011. It was published in 2012. I hope at some point this article will be wrong. I hear all the time from people that “Agile has crossed the chasm. Agile is everywhere. Agile has made inroads to every organization, to every industry, yes, to every type of software development.
Are you interested in how to manage agile projects? Thinking of transitioning to agile? Available on March 7, 2013? I am leading an experiential one-day tutorial in conjunction with AgileIndy to introduce the ideas of agile project management to people who are interested in agile project management in Indianapolis on March 7, 2013. The tutorial
Someone asked me again about self-assessments for their agile transition. That got me thinking about this problem of transitioning to agile. I don’t believe agile is for everyone in every circumstance. Some people claim agile has “crossed the chasm.” Certainly, many people are aware of agile. Many people understand that a cross-functional team works in
Many months ago, Rebecca asked an interesting question about technical debt in projects. She asked, How to start when there’s a really big mess? In that case, small, just being a professional clean-up acts may not even make a dent. Of course, as with any good question, the answer is, “it depends.” And the biggest