In Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 1, I wrote about circumstances under which a team might want a coach. It wasn’t an exhaustive list. It had several questions defining when coaches might help the team to become agile, not be cargo cult agile. One of the reasons we might need coaches for a team is because
There was a fascinating Twitter conversation last week when I was busy writing other things. (I also find Twitter to be a difficult-for-me arena to have a conversation. I need more than 140 characters.) The conversation started when Neil Killick tweeted this: orgs need coaches not because “agile is unintuitive”, but because effective sw delivery
Agile 2015 was the week of Aug 3-7 this year. It was a great week. Here are the links to my interviews and talks. Interview with Dave Prior. We spoke about agile programs, continuous planning, and how you might use certifications. I made a little joke about measurement. Interview with Paul DuPuy of SolutionsIQ. We
We encounter problems all the time. Some we can resolve on our own in a couple of minutes. Some take more time, and/or we can’t resolve them alone. What do you do then? I’ve had a policy for about twenty years for when I become stuck. If I’m stuck for more than twenty minutes, it’s
Several years ago, I had a senior VP as a client. He wanted his managers to work as more of a team. He thought they were not working together for the good of the company. I asked him why he thought that. “When they estimate, they don’t work together on an estimate. They each estimate
I have finished integrating comments from the early review of Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization. I decided that the book was good enough to release to the general public. I find it difficult to release books in progress. The in-progress part challenges my perfection rules. However, since this is an
I retweeted a link to Here’s a Thing: There’s No Correlation Between a College Degree and Coding Ability. I was a bit surprised by some of the reactions to that link. One colleague said, “I question whether people who wait until a college assignment to learn to code have the same obsessive interest in the topic.”
I was thinking about the best projects and teams I know. They work in different industries and have different customers. Some are engineering teams. Some are IT. Some are agile; some aren’t. Some are in transition. One thing they have in common is that they are happy teams. If you asked them to show you
The Northeast is in the midst of the Blizzard of 2015. Right now, I’m sitting snug in my home office, waiting for the blizzard to be over. I still have power and heat, which is great! I was wondering—what do you do on a snow day? If you’re agile and you are accustomed to having
Johanna’s 2014 New Year’s Tips Every year, I write a tips letter for you, instead of suggesting you try resolutions. Maybe you can incorporate one of these tips to make your 2015 more effective. Tip #1: Create time for your thinking work. You have meetings. You have email. You have voicemail, text messages, and more