Workshop Objective: You may have started with technical component teams long ago. You were all responsible for your own teams, as technical leaders. It made sense then. Now, you need to work together, in an agile or lean organization. This workshop will help you learn how to be technical problem-solving leaders, as a team, in […]
I’ve said before that you cannot use capacity planning for the project portfolio. I also said that managers often want to know how much the project will cost. Why? Because businesses have to manage costs. No one can have runaway projects. That is fair. If you use an agile or incremental approach to your projects,
I was thinking about the Glen Alleman’s post, All Things Project Are Probabilistic. In it, he says, Management is Prediction as a inference from Deming. When I read this quote, If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. –Deming I infer from Deming that managers must
Is Your Agile Journey Based on Problems or Process? You can start your agile journey in any number of ways. Some people like to start with Scrum, because it’s a project management framework. Some people like to start with Kanban, because it reflects your current project approach and allows you to visualize your workflow. You
I was problem-solving with a potential client the other day. They want to manage their project portfolio. They use Jira, so they think they can see everything everyone is doing. (I’m a little skeptical, but, okay.) They want to know how much the teams can do, so they can do capacity planning based on what
I sent a Pragmatic Manager email last week, How to Avoid Three Big Estimation Traps. If you subscribed, you’d have seen it already. (That was a not-so-subtle hint to subscribe 🙂 If you’re not sure of the value of being on yet-another-email list, browse the back issues. You can see I’m consistent. Not about the
If you’ve been paying attention to agile at all, you’ve heard these terms: pairing and swarming. But what do they mean? What’s the difference? When you pair, two people work together to finish a piece of work. Traditionally, two developers paired. The “driver” wrote the piece of work. The other person, the “navigator,” observed the
Workshop: Create Your Successful Agile (& Lean) Project Workshop Workshop Objective: Learn how to deliver value as a collaborative team. You’ll use agile and lean principles, and experiment with various practices to help you find your agile approach. Workshop Overview: As you practice with your project, you’ll learn how to create your collaborative team. Then,
In my role as technical editor for agileconnection.com, I have the opportunity to read many terrific articles. I also have the opportunity to review and comment on those articles. One such comment is what do teams do? Do they “gel” or do they “jell”? Gel is what you put in hair. When you “gel” things,
Standup or Handoff? You have a geographically distributed agile team. You have team members more than six hours apart. (If you’re not sure how far apart people are, take a look at Managing Timezones in Geographically Distributed Teams). How do you have standups that mean something, when people have completed work, can commit to work, and