Joanie, a new VP Engineering, joined the company a couple of weeks ago. Her boss, the CEO, wants to know how long it will take engineering to finish all the projects. Joanie asked the various leaders these questions for every project in progress: When did you start this project? Are you still working on this […]
When we speak, we often use shortcuts, jargon, and cleverness to get our points across. If we confuse anyone in the audience, we can explain what we’re thinking in the moment. However, when we write, all that cleverness doesn’t always help our ideal reader understand. Sometimes, we alienate or confuse our ideal readers with our
Continuing the series on dependencies… Maybe you don’t have the problem where the team creates internal dependencies with their process. And you don’t have to wait for someone outside the team to approve your work—an organizational process. But you do have a combination of platform/component teams and feature teams. I see this most often in
Did you ever work on a project that dragged on and on, slipping a week every week? Back in the day, we called those projects “death marches.” I never saw anyone literally die, but I saw too many divorces, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and very dissatisfied and unhappy employees and customers. Waterfall projects can
If you’ve ever tried to write nonfiction, you probably encountered these problems: Your readers only understood what you wrote. Not what you meant to write. Only some readers got value from your pieces, not everyone. The writing you ended up with at the end might have looked very different from the piece you started with.
You have some terrific experience in your team, such as pairing, and you decide it’s time to write about it. And you have a problem. The developers and testers need one perspective, coaches need a different perspective, and managers need a third perspective. What do you do? Choose one ideal reader and write a piece
There was a Twitter discussion about XP not having crossed the chasm. Someone Lula Rodrigues posted this wonderful Kent Beck talk about that here: https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/videos/xp-as-an-incentive-system-kent-beck-xp-2018/. Lots of great insights. Watch all of it, including the Q&A at the end. Early in the video, Kent discusses the all-too-frequent sexism and racism I also see in tech.
Daniel Vacanti and Prateek Singh graciously invited* me to be on an episode of Drunk Agile: Episode 37 Johanna Rothman Part Deux More Bigger Aging. (*Invited is their term. I sent them an email, politely demanding they discuss aging. Is it possible to politely demand? I tried. Only they can tell you if I was
Modern Management: Catch People Succeeding When was the last time someone noticed that you did something great? Too often, we hear plenty about what we did that was wrong. But we have research—and experience—that says when people notice what we do well, we tend to do more of that. Here are two examples. A Team Skills
Do you ever encounter perfection rules when you write (or create in any way)? Maybe you’ve heard these statements—or you’ve said them to yourself: We must spend a lot of time “polishing” to create perfect writing. We must not publish until the work is perfect. We can create a perfect piece and it’s worth our