I spoke with a potential client last week. She said, “I’m waving the agile flag. But no one cares.” I wrote a Pragmatic Manager to sort through what I wanted to say to her. Read it at Feeling Alone on Your Agile Journey. If you feel stuck in the middle, or you’re alone, or you […]
A number of my clients are attempting to use agile as they transition from a strict waterfall to a more adaptive approach to their projects. One problem the change artists have is this: The managers, product managers, and maybe even the customers want to define all the requirements up front. I have not found the
Feeling Alone on Your Agile Journey? Do you feel as if you are waving the agile flag and no one cares? You know what you, your team, and your management needs to do. No one seems to be able to put your suggestions into practice. Worse, sometimes, it looks as if no one cares, except
For many people, agile means an end to all project management. I disagree. I find value in servant leadership in project management. I explain how you can think about servant leadership and agile project management in my projectmanagement.com column this month: Servant Leadership: The Agile Way. If you are looking to increase your servant leadership
In more traditional projects, the Project Management Institute has a notion that you can “control” a project. I have never found that to be true. Of course, I never quite used a waterfall approach–I have used feature-driven approaches more often than I used a serial approach. But the idea that I could somehow control a
I met a team recently who was concerned about their velocity. They were always “too late” according to their manager. I asked them what they measured and how. They measured the burndown for each iteration. They calculated the number of points they could claim for each story. Why? Because they didn’t always finish the stories they
I have a problem with the way many people talk about Scrum. They say “agile/Scrum,” as though they’re the same thing. No, no, no. Scrum is just one way to approach agile. It’s a terrific project management framework, especially for cross-functional teams that work on one project at a time. Scrum does not say anything
I am shepherding an experience report for XP 2016. A shepherd is sort-of like a technical editor. I help the writer(s) tell their story in the best possible way. I enjoy it and I learn from working with the authors to tell their stories. The writers for this experience report want to pair-write. They have
Define Your Agile Success I bet many of you are working to use agile in your organization. Is your agile approach working for you? If you think you could use agile better, maybe it’s time to define what agile success means to you. Consider these three questions: What is valuable to us? How will we
Many people like to start the new year with resolutions. I’m not one of them. I don’t like resolutions unless they are very small action steps I can take every day. Too often, people select resolutions such as “Lose twenty pounds this year.” That’s big. It doesn’t have small things I can do each day.