One of the problems in a geographically distributed team is the dreaded email chain. Someone has a problem and sends an email. Probably late in the day, when he or she is frustrated after pounding on the problem all day, getting nowhere–except more frustrated. Sally sends the email to the project team. I take offense […]
Back at OOP 2012, I gave a talk called “Six Behaviors to Consider When Hiring for an Agile Team.” These are all team-based, interpersonal skills that any team needs, but are critical on an agile team: collaboration; how to stop when something is good enough–especially when the customer says so; how to ask for help,
I’m doing a webinar with Rally on March 7. It’s about selecting the Number One project in your project portfolio. Please join me and Isaac Montgomery, who will attempt to rein me in (ha!) for What’s the Number One Project in Your Project Portfolio? on March 7. Here’s an excerpt from the description: You have
Using Checkins to Create Transparency Do You Want to Work More Effectively in Geographically Distributed Teams? In preparation for our geographically distributed teams webinar last week, Shane and I asked people what their greatest challenge was for their teams. Many of the comments were about communication and trust. One question was this: “How can I help
Shane and I recorded a webinar at noon today, about our Geographically Distributed Agile Teams workshop. We had a great time, and answered a lot of questions. We had a few recording glitches, so if you hear me talking over Shane, oops. To me, it sounded as if he was not talking. There is a
The very nice folks from Øredev 2011 have posted my video about agile project portfolio management. You might not think that Malmo, Sweden in November would be a hot time, but for me it was! I met great people and had a wonderful time.
Please join Shane Hastie and me for a webinar about our Geographically Distributed Teams workshop on Feb 15, at noon Eastern. Want to make your geographically distributed agile projects more effective? Join Johanna Rothman and Shane Hastie for this webinar where they will discuss their workshop, Working Effectively In Geographically Distributed Agile Project Teams. We’ll
I hope that by now you see that you have any number of choices for your lifecycle if you are geographically distributed team and you are transitioning to agile. I do recommend a servant leader agile project manager, for coordination and risk management. With people all over the world, it’s difficult to coordinate the project,
Example 3: Using a Project Manager with Iterations and Kanban and Silo’d Teams Here, the developers were in Cambridge, MA, the product owners were in San Francisco, the testers were in Bangalore, and the project manager was always flying somewhere, because the project manager was shared among several projects. The developers knew about timeboxed iterations,
How many times have you seen this in your projects: You need something specific done such as a new database, or a specific user interface designed, or you need a release engineer, or a user interface designer, or a part of the system tested and the normal person who does that work is not available?