I published another Pragmatic Manager this week, Time for a Decision. It’s about program management decisions, and collaborating across the organization. Do you receive my Pragmatic Manager emails? If you think you are on my list, but are not receiving my emails, let me know. Some of you long-time subscribers are not receiving my emails […]
Time for a Decision On a recent flight, I sat next to the VP of Sales for a large multinational company. Their new big product in development needs a new pricing structure that requires agreement across the organization. Can he get a decision? No. He’s conducted conference call after conference call for months. No decision.
One of my clients was having trouble with estimating work they had never done before, so I wrote an article explaining spikes. That article is up on agileconnection: Need to Learn More about the Work You’re Doing? Spike It! It was a little serendipity; I taught an estimation workshop right after I explained how to
Three Tips for Becoming a Servant Leader You and I both know that we’re not supposed to boss people around anymore, that we’re supposed to be servant leaders. Well, a client asked me, “What the heck is servant leadership?” When you’re a traditional manager, you might have thought of accumulating people and power. If you
I have posted several slideshares for your reading pleasure. You won’t get the pleasure of my humor, eye rolling and jokes. Nope, for that you would have had to hear me speak. In September, I spoke at AgileSoCal, and had an interactive talk, Agile Teams and Collaboration: What’s New About Agile? I have a small
Did you see Dwayne Phillips’ post today, Adding People to a Late Project? Dwayne says: Adding people to a late project only makes it later. We have known this for decades. Especially in the article he refers to, it seems as if there might be no end to the number of people added. Did anyone
We’ve all read a lot about agile software development—the various flavors and methods sprouting up to tackle new issues in requirements, architecture, design, coding, and testing. But it’s rare to hear real, tangible, objective lessons based on the experiences of those who have tried some form of agile development and failed. Get ready to take
One of the challenges in a program is how you manage the checkins, especially if you have continuous integration. I am quite fond of continuous integration, no matter how large your program is. I also like short iterations. (Remember Short is Beautiful?) But imagine a product where you have a platform and layers. I’m separating
“It’s time for our annual management meeting to rank everyone in engineering,” Don, the VP started to explain to his three directors. “Hold on a minute,” interrupted Dave, the development director. “We didn’t do this last year, because we explained we can’t be objective and it makes no sense. We thought we eliminated this nonsense.”
When I was in Brazil teaching the project portfolio workshop, one of the participants explained that his organization sometimes did a form of gold/silver/bronze comparison among the projects. Here’s how it works. Everyone wrote their project names on stickies. The first cut is everyone self-assigns their projects to Gold, Silver, Bronze categories. That’s right, everyone