Now, say you are looking for a job as an agile project manager. Some people might say that’s a crazy job. But hang in there with me for a minute. Imagine you have two or three teams, larger than two pizzas might feed. So, you might well need an agile project manager to coordinate the […]
If you are looking for a project manager, what questions might you ask? Well, it might depend if you are agile, or geographically distributed, or how large a project or program you have. All of those pieces of your context are going to feed into your question development. I hope you ask behavior-description questions. That
I facilitated a project management clinic last week at PSL. One of the questions was this: We have a product owner who persists in changing the contents of the sprint during the sprint. This is difficult for us. It costs us to change the content. Okay, this is a huge pain in the tush. It’s
In my talk, How Much Will this Project Cost? at Agile 2012 last week, I got to say, “Short is beautiful.” For those of you who have never seen me, I’m five feet tall. The question was something like this: For programs, don’t you want longer iterations, so people don’t have the overhead of planning,
I’ve been talking to a variety of potential clients about their project portfolios. One of the big problems is how to see all the work. Some of these folks have multiple kinds of projects, so they want to show their work in a variety of ways. What do you do when you have a few
I’m giving a talk at Agile 2012, entitled “How Much Will This Project Cost?” It doesn’t seem to matter what life cycle your project has, someone wants you to predict the cost. The problem is, it’s the wrong question. But, that won’t stop people from asking it anyway. People want to know the cost so
Do you have a product owner who doesn’t want to admit to technical debt? “Give me another feature! And another feature! Just keep giving me features! It’s feature time, baby!” Once a product owner has the heady feeling of seeing features one after the other, it’s difficult for that product owner to consider anything other
I’ve been having some email conversations with some project and program managers turned Scrum Masters. In general here’s how things have proceeded: Their organizations decided agile was a great idea Their organizations decided Scrum was a great idea to implement agile (because they don’t know the difference between Scrum and agile) The teams started working
I’m speaking on July 24 for the PMI Agile community of practice, delivering a webinar at noon Eastern about Agile Project Portfolio Management. If you are a PMI member, it is free. Please do join us!
I delivered a keynote about influence and authority last week at Better Software/Agile Development Practices. I have also uploaded them to slideshare. For those of you who were not at the conference, I told a story about transitioning to agile as a running story throughout the keynote. I hope the slides stand alone. Maybe they